Hello!

Nothing too exciting going on, but at least I have an iota more motivation and energy this week ... just enough in fact to pop up this mid-week post.

That hamstring strain I mentioned that I picked up during the TELL 10k race was real enough, but not too serious. Rather than run on Tuesday morning I swam about 1500 m, the first as general laps and the next 500 as five repeats of 100 m at hard effort with a couple minutes rest. I got out for a run in the afternon with a work colleague, Ms. Uchida. Our company's annual ekiden taikai is coming up in a couple of weekends time. For training we do a lap of the Imperial Palace (5k) and I try to encourage her to run at a challenging, but not debilitating pace. The week before last she did it in 27:11, last night she brought it home in 26:51. Without a lot of other training in between, that represents decent improvement. For me it was just a nice relaxing leg turnover effort and showed that the hamstring was not too bad, but I'd still need to be careful with it this week.

Last night was the regular interval workout at the track. With the lovely, balmy late spring weather there was a big turnout. Club leader Bob decided we would do Yasso 800s -- a set of 10 x 800 m run in the same number of minutes & seconds as target marathon time in hours & minutes with a 400 m jog between repeats. I was not too keen on this workout, but the niggle meant that whatever we did I was going to have to back off the intensity anyway, so I joined a 3:15 group, and because of time constraints we only did eight. All repeats were pretty close to the mark. Here are our times, dropping off the "3:" minutes: 17.0, 14.8, 17.5, 14.8, 13.3, 14.6, 13.6, 15.0. Did you notice that last one? It took us eight tries, but we finally did one in 3:15.0!

I plan to run home tonight and back to work again tomorrow morning. If I have a decent run on Saturday and Sunday as well, that will get me close to another 70 or 80 km week. I guess that's a reasonable enough base mode to be in.