5k, 10k, 60mins?
Posted by thepeteplan on May 21, 2008
I’m now only 10days away from the first big test of Pete Plan 2008, the half marathon. My confidence of doing a personal best time for that row in 10days time is actually pretty low at the moment as I simply don’t feel good and fast this week. Either I have a slight illness lingering in the back ground, or there is some residual fatigue from the cycling on Sunday. Perhaps it’s just one of those things, when training at quite a high level I think we all go through periods where training feels great and every performance is high, and effortless, then periods where each session is a struggle and seems to stretch on forever.
As I’d not rested as normal on Sunday I decided to rest from the erg on Monday, and only cycled to and from work. On Tuesday I again cycled to and from work, and then entered a rowpro 5k in the evening.
Tuesday evening 5k:
The pacing for this 5k was a little odd. If you remember I rowed a week or two back on rowpro with a guy doing a challenge of rowing a 1k at sub 1:40 pace (roughly his 2k pb pace) every day for 40days. If that wasn’t hard enough he decided yesterday to make this the first 1k of a 5k. So I went along with that pace for the first 1k and then cruised the rest of the 5k. It felt like I was cruising the rest of it anyway, but it actually turned out to be a very solid time:
5k = 17:06.2 / 1:42.6 / 29
500m splits:
1:39.1, 1:40.6, 1:45.1, 1:45.6, 1:45.0, 1:44.4, 1:42.9, 1:42.9, 1:41.4, 1:39.1
I wasn’t planning on doing a better 5k for this month’s CTC challenge, but I think I will try to fit one in very early next week if I can.
Wednesday steady 10k:
Today I actually had time for a gym session at my preferred time of day, lunchtime. Just a steady 10k. Again I have set targets for the people I’m training with and not looked myself even which session I should be doing which day.
10k = 37:36.3 / 1:52.8 / 24
2k splits: 1:54.3, 1:53.4, 1:52.1, 1:52.1, 1:51.4
Just a nice steady row as I’ve been feeling tired all week. On Saturday I have a tester session that could be make or break for confidence for the HM test the following weekend – a hard 60min row. For me this is 4/5 of the duration of a half marathon, so as long as I can complete it at half marathon pb pace it will give me confidence for the HM the following weekend. The idea really is to do it a bit faster than that, but even HM pb pace is 1:46.6, so that would be faster than I’ve rowed an hour for some time. Fingers crossed for a dry day on Saturday to do the row in the garden – anyone local care to join me? Failing that I could see if I can get some company on rowpro.
