A short interval

After yesterday's euphoric run, today was much tougher. I kept waking up all morning. The first time I got up I got all my clothes out of the drawers and was about to get dressed when I checked the time: 3am. So back to bed I went, until I woke up again at 4am. And 5am. And at 6am I couldn't put it off any more, so I pulled on my gear and headed out the door.

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.