A New PB – and it hurt!

After a fairly lack lustre bike and run session on Thursday evening and then a similarly poor turbo trainer session on Friday I wasn’t really looking forward to a hard bike session followed immediately by a hard run on Saturday.

I was coming to the end of a hard week of training, my achilles was sore and brick sessions (a bike followed by a run) are notoriously hard. What’s more, I’d mowed the lawn the day before so my back was a little sore and we’d had a busy day running around doing some beekeeping so I wasn’t really ready for it. Despite this, I set up a little transition area – well, I put my running shoes outside – before we headed off into Aberystwyth to inspect the bees in our out apiary.

The plan was to inspect the bees, then drive to the leisure centre where Anna and Morgan were going to go swimming. I meanwhile would cycle back to Borth, do my bike session and then head off for a run. The bike session went well. After a 10 mile warm up it consisted of ten 1 mile hard efforts with 90 seconds recovery between them. I did it by going backwards and forwards between Borth and Tre-Ddol a couple of times and pushed quite hard during the intervals. It was then a quick 2 mile ride back to our house a rapid transition into my running shoes and then off for a quick loop around to the boatyard.

I went flat out on the run for the first mile, doing it in 5:41, my fastest ever 1 mile. I was wearing my new race shoes which felt lovely on the tarmac, but weren’t so great off road. My pace therefore slowed a little for the next mile which was across the soft sand of the estuary but I kept the effort up as long as I could. Things got painful for the last stretch back towards our house. This was back on tarmac but went up over a little hill and into the wind. I kept the pressure on as much as I could and finally finished the varied terrain 2.5 miles in 15:07. That was a new PB for that course, my previous being 16:03 set almost a year ago on May 26th 2011.

It’s good to push hard now and then and maybe I am getting a little faster? Lets hope so.

Although, you could argue that it’s all down to the shoes. I’ve only worn my new race shoes (Brooks T7 Racers) twice. Once in the Pwllheli Triathlon where I set a new PB for 5k and then once on Saturday where I set a new PB for the boatyard loop.

Tags: PBrunningTriathlon