Haven't written much about running lately but it doesn't mean I haven't been running. Summer track season is now half over and our competitions have been mainly conducted on cracking hot days, with the couple of evening meets also coinciding with very hot weather.
Training has proceeded right through summer with speed sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a group run on Wednesday evenings and a long run Sunday mornings after Saturday's competition.
The speed sessions could be fourteen 400s on the university track; six loops of a 1600 metre course in Princes Park with three minute recoveries; six or eight 400 metre hills in Royal Park. Sometimes a relatively easier session such as six 600s or three eleven minute surges with two minute recovery jogs. In the heat, these sessions are arduous. Our running bunch has varying abilities and we encourage each other and re-group for the slower runners by running the recovery parts of the linear sessions in reverse until they catch up. We also trash-talk each other mercilessly.
Yesterday's competition was at Williamstown in overcast, stormy conditions. First up was the 3000 metres walk (an event I accidentally won many years ago and which I have since been unable to escape being selected, it really is an oddity but so is polevault and hammerthrowing) followed half an hour later by the 5 kilometre run. Twelve and a half laps of torture. In recent weeks I have been running 1500s and thought they were hard but the 5000 metres is a shocker.
This morning we had an eighteen kilometre run along the Yarra to Heidelberg, a beautiful location where nineteenth century artists used to go to paint (the Heidelberg School). There's an information poster along the walking track telling some of the history of Arthur Streeton.
We didn't stop to read it but I felt I was running through his beautiful paintings.
Maybe I was.
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