Thursday, October 12, 2006

Bang in a quick blog...

Very busy at work at the moment but I don't want to get too far behind in my bloggin' so I'll just make this a quickie. I had the pleasure of attending a cocktail party on the HMS Westminster on Tuesday night. It is a class 23 Frigate on a tour of Asia. It was another superb autumn evening and we had great views back over the Tokyo skyline. I got chatting to the bloke who is in charge of shooting enemy submarines. I must have sounded interested in the business side of things because he gave me a tour of the upper deck. Fascinating to see all the pointy hardware -- batteries of missile launchers, the big gun, torpedo hatches, and so on. All a bit sobering in the light of Kim Jong Il's recent antics.

As a result of the cocktail party (well, the cocktails to be precise -- strictly a few quiet G&Ts) I didn't get up for a run on Wednesday morning. But a couple of people had been asking me about doing the 1600 m repeats again. So, for my Wednesday evening run, that's what we did -- four by 1600 with a 400 steady pace recovery. I was pretty happy with the results because I tried to stay comfortable and not push too hard, yet all four repeats were under six minutes: 5:57, 5:58, 6:00, 5:55. Actually, I did push a bit hard on that last one. I was contemplating a fifth but instead just ran three kilometers on the track in 4:07, 4:13, 4:16. As this is about target marathon pace, it is interesting to look at what the average heart rate was for these after having done the four 1600 m reps at a lactate accumulation intensity -- they were 156, 163, 163. The first one is a bit low because I'd had a short break. The other two suggest that I was certainly not recovering at that pace.

With some aerobic distance before the workout I was touching on 20 km for the evening.

2 comments:

Ewen said...

Good session Steve. Is a 'qick blog' faster than a quick one?
;)

Tesso said...

Glad you didn't do the old "what's this button for?" :-)