Hi All,

If you read my report about race one of this series you would know that I had planned for a lot of improvement in this race.  Alas, it was not to be.  After race one I was training hard, and hoping for quite a bit more speed.  Everything went well for a week and a half, and then I hurt my achillies.  I was running with a group at the time, and I felt the exact moment that I hurt it.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the brains to stop. 

I backed off a bit, and could still feel a little twinge but decided it would be fine, so I kept going for the rest of the session.  Then I went and did the strength and stability class with the rest of the group.  All the time I could feel a little ache, but thought it was nothing.  Then I went into the restaurant with the rest of the group, and had some dinner.  Then, finally, I stood up and walked outside, got on my bike and went to ride home.  It was as I started pedalling that I first realised it might be a little worse than I had thought, with any attempt to pedal properly producing sharp jolts of pain.  So I rode home very easy, iced it a little when I got home, then went to bed.

The next morning it was even worse, and it took me about 5 minutes to get down the five flights of stairs to my apartment.  So I decided to rest it for a few days.  This turned into a week, then a week and a half, then two weeks, with it not really getting any better.  Finally, I had to go away on a work trip and spend a couple of days walking around building sites, and all the time it was aching.  I got home on the Friday night, with the race being on the Saturday, and me not having done anything for over two weeks.  I was feeling like a start was pretty unlikely.

It happened that on that particular night someone was having a party, and I decided that since I needed some dinner and probably wasn't going to be running anyway I might as well go by to say hello.  First though I went for a swim with a training squad, deliberately leaving my swim fins (how I love my swim fins) at home, but still grimacing everytime I forgot what I was doing and kicked off the wall with both feet.  Then I went out to the party, had a great night, and ended up not getting home until much later than intended.  My plan was still to go along to the race, to support a friend who was running, and she called me to tell me which train was best - lucky because otherwise I would have slept through.  Getting dressed to head over, the clothes I put on ended up being running clothes.  Then I got to the race, and reasoned that after two and a half weeks of rest there was no sign of improvement, so I might as well try something different.  I entered the race.

Now it happened that on the day it was freezing cold and raining, which meant there were noticably less starters.  Even though I started right at the back and needed 14 seconds to get to the line I managed to get into open space relatively quickly, and settled into what I hoped was a sustainable rhythm.  At this stage my aim was simply to equal my last result. In terms of the achillies, I decided that unless it started feeling noticably worse, I would simply run in what I hoped was a kind manner, and not try to kick hard with it or anything like that.  I expected my stride length to be significantly decreased, but funnily enough, when I looked at the results on the computer later, it wasn't.

A little bit more thought was clearly called for, and I looked at the relative distances of each lap (taken at km marks).  The polar I use has a foot pod, which sits on my right foot, with the left being the one that was sore.  It turned out that the polar measured almost every lap this week as being longer than the same lap a month ago.  So when I scaled the stride length to get the lap length the same, suddenly I was taking shorter strides this week for all except the second lap.  I was also taking them slower, with the overall result being that after my initial surge there were now people passing me, starting from about 4km in, and continuing.  Occassionally I would think I should try and hold on to someone, but I would always quickly feel that little bit more pain and back off again.  I ended up coming in with a watch time of 45:32, which was 34 seconds slower than last time. 

Lap times were:

04:39.0

04:24.1

04:25.8

04:29.9

04:32.4

04:35.0

04:33.8

04:41.4

04:39.2

04:31.7

My achillies was also aching a bit, and I still had to get home.  As soon as I did get home though I wrapped it in ice, and it has pretty much stayed that way since, and it actually now seems to be feeling better than it was on Friday, so maybe a bit of excercise was just what it needed.  It still isn't perfect though, and I don't want to push my luck with excercising it, so this is going to be yet another very light week.  This leads me with the dilema of what to aim for next time.  I think realistically it will be quite dependant on the recovery process, but I am targetting under 41 minutes.  Hopefully this time things will go a little more to plan!

Cheers,
Rowan