16 km of cool

Today: 16.7 km
Week: 60 km

I got to bed at a reasonable time last night but it seemed to take forever to go to sleep. This has become a recurring theme lately whenever I have an early training session scheduled.

Although I'd penciled Friday's in as 1600-m intervals, the failure last week has shaken my confidence in my ability to produce appropriate times on these chilly, chilly mornings -- about 2 degrees today. And there is always that knee to consider. So I just ran aerobically. Not quite as hard as Wednesday night, but something like first 4km at 68%, 2 km at 75%, 6 km at 77%, and the last 4km home at progressive build up averaging 80% (but finishing with a hard near-sprint reaching 88%). (Percentages are heart rate as % of HRmax.)

The whole run felt pretty comfortable, but a definite feeling of moving along at a good clip. Kilometers six through 12 averaged slightly faster than 4:30/km pace. The harder run home averaged 4:23/km. With three more weeks of training the way this week is unfolding I would expect to see these paces dropping by 5 to 10 seconds.

And related to Scott's post, I had some natto with dinner last night. I felt compelled to stir it briskly for 60 seconds and got a good slimey, icky texture going. It was almost enough to motivate me to learn how to post clips to YouTube. If anybody would like to see a gross-out video of me slurping up some natto or raw egg, mention it in comments and I'll see what I can do. Or Scott and I should perhaps compete to see who can come up with a clip of their most, er, adventurous Japanese dining experience. I still relish the day that a visiting former work colleague from Australia took me out to dinner and told me to order anything. He could handle anything, no problem. But it was sure fun watching him try to eat that chicken liver sashimi without gagging!