Tuesday night is track night.  This involves different combinations of speedwork round Battersea Park’s 400m track and last night it almost killed me.

This week’s schedule was 4 x 1 mile reps with 75-90 second recoveries followed by 8 x 60 sprints on the grass.  I may have been unfortunate to start on a night that involved mile reps, or I may have been lucky that the reps weren’t shorter and therefore faster, I’m currently undecided…

Again, we were split into 3 groups and I chose the ‘third group’, note not ‘slow group’ but the ‘third’.  As the group started the pace didn’t feel too bad, but as the laps continued I started to fall behind, by the time we’d finished the 4^th lap and completed the first mile I collapsed on the grass.  That was one of four done, I barely had a chance to catch my breath and we were off again.  The second mile was awful, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to pass out, vomit, have an asthma attack or an unfortunate combination of all of the above.  As a result I only ran 3 of the 4 laps, what a complete loser.  Mile 3 was much the same but I was determined to complete all 4 laps on the final mile and promised myself a nice little lay down on the grass afterwards.

The little laydown didn’t last long as we finished with our 60m sprints, but these actually weren’t so bad, almost enjoyable compared to the mile reps!

I finished my first track session in bits, having pretty much come in last, having only completed 14 of the 16 laps and this morning I was walking like a penguin again.

On the brightside, we were supposed to be hitting our 10k pace, possibly 5k if feeling strong.  This would put my 5k time at 21.44 and 10k at 43.29, both of which I would be more than chuffed with so it’s not all bad!

So that’s track then, same again next week yeah?!

Me. Walking