I last blogged when I was waiting at Heathrow airport for a flight to Las Vegas for a few days at a work event. On my first full day there I decided to just go and have a walk through the hotel gym with no expectation to see an erg there. To my surprise there was one lone erg tucked away in the corner, and as I had about 45mins spare I went out of the gym, straight back to my room, got changed and headed back to the gym.
January 15th:
30mins = 8103m / 1:51.0 / 25
The hotel gym was pretty hot and stuffy, as they usually are. It is strange as the US is the land of air conditioning that somehow hotel gyms still seem to be too hot. So the following day I just decided to do something a bit different with some negative split 1min reps – no targets or expectations, just negative splitting by a second a rep from a warm up pace of 1:49.
January 16th:
18 x 1min / 1min rest = 5371 / 1:40.5 / 30
Negative split with rep paces of:
1:49.4, 1:48.6, 1:47.5, 1:46.3, 1:45.2, 1:44.5, 1:43.4, 1:42.3, 1:41.6, 1:40.6, 1:39.6, 1:38.6, 1:37.7, 1:36.4, 1:35.8, 1:34.6, 1:33.7, 1:29.0
Friday 17th I then made my third transatlantic flight of the week with a short hop from Las Vegas to LA, then a couple of hours later the long flight back to London, arriving home about midday on Saturday 18th. No training then while I recovered over the weekend ready to head back to work on Monday. I headed home from work about an hour early on Monday 20th as I was so tired, and did a nice slow 30mins on the erg to help me sleep that night. A few days of early nights, and a further rest day on the Tuesday and I decided it was time to give the 5k a go. I wanted to do this as a marker to see what effect the 3 weeks of travel had on my form. I had done a 17:19.9 for 5k back on 19th Dec when I’d been training well, and although my 2 weeks in Seattle had some good training, it also had too much good food and drink. And lots of long haul travel never does me any good. I decided to set of aiming to pace the 5k just the same as that recent 5k in mid December and just see how far I could get. I was pleasantly surprised just to pip the December time.
January 22nd:
5k = 17:19.3 / 1:43.9 / 29
First 3k in 500m splits: 1:43.1, 1:44.9, 1:44.9, 1:44.9, 1:44.9, 1:44.9
Last 2k in 500m splits: 1:44.7, 1:44.7, 1:44.0, 1:38.3
January 23rd:
30mins = 7974m / 1:52.8 / 23
Then after an easy row on Thursday, with the confidence and good knowledge of current form from the 5k, I decided it was a good opportunity to put in a 10k for the challenge series. Having used a 1:45 base pace in the 5k I decided on a 1:48 base pace for the 10k. I went out with a usual faster start with 7 hard strokes, 10 strokes to settle down to pace, then took a few hundred more metres to settle nicely on 1:48s, hence the faster first 1k. I kept this going to the half way point, then decided to slowly negative split to maintain the average pace that had dropped to 1:47.5 at this point. So from 5k to go I maintained the 1:47.5 average split until 4k to go, then aiming to slowly chip it down with (at that point) the intention of dropping it below 1:47.0 by the end. As I entered the last 2000m I still felt ok, and thought the season’s best was on. Unfortunately I wasn’t quite sure what my season’s best was, other than I thought it was in the 35:30s. So I began a strong negative split inside the last 2k, with a very strong last 1k and especially last 300m or so with 1:28s down the line to just dip under 35:30 and be sure of the SB. Chasing the predicted time by that point I wasn’t watching the split pace (which I normally do to maintain consistent pacing), so I was a little surprised to see quite how fast the last 1k had been.
January 24th:
10k = 35:29.9 / 1:46.4 / 28
1k splits first 5k: 1:46.0, 1:47.9, 1:47.9, 1:47.8, 1:47.8
1k splits last 5k: 1:47.4, 1:47.2, 1:47.0, 1:45.6, 1:40.2