Wednesday is hills day, and although Singapore isn't blessed with hills in the way that Seattle and Bellevue are, there's still Fort Canning to run up. I trotted out to the bay at a slow pace, got a little lost in Clarke Quay, then tried running up the hill at 3:45 km pace.
That isn't as easy as it sounds. It's certainly not as easy as I thought it would be, and my intervals got progressively slower with each repetition. These are the longest ones I've done yet: sprinting up a hill for 90 seconds is pure misery by the third or fourth attempt, and I had six goes today.
My magical bottle of sports drink didn't seem to help either. Maybe it was because I didn't spend all of Tuesday sat on a plane, watching my ankles get fatter, that I went so much slower today. Or perhaps I was just worn out.
I got home about ten minutes after my wife had left for work, spent half an hour sweating, then showered and went to work.
For the rest of the day, I was a shadow of my normal self. I'd forgotten how interval training can take it out of you. I was exhausted, I was hungry, I had all the muscles in my calves complaining and trying to tense up at once. You can't sleep on the floor in my offic while eating a sandwich and yodelling with pain, so it was a hard, hard day for me to bear. Plus it's only the second day of the week for me: 6 miles ('easy') tomorrow, a hard six on friday, and sixteen miles over the weekend. Which is all faintly ridiculous; the week before I went to Bellevue I did a total of 26 miles, and I'll be close to that over the first four days of this week - I'm also running faster, so it's hammering me from both sides.
Still, this is the second week in the cycle; if I can get through this and next week (about 41 miles, all told) then it goes downhill for a week - well, 33 miles will constitute a recovery week, and that will include going hard up the hill for 4 sets of two minutes. So it's going to get harder before it gets easier, and even when it's easier it's going to be harder.
So I suppose I can't wait for Osaka. If I keep on like this, I'm going to blow right past my old record for the course.
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