Time-trial confidence booster

Sunday, 7th April – 14.0km MP Run (Overall: 4:35/km) 
Part 1     Part 2
My last session before Rotterdam – I chose a 14km run with 10km @ MP. Drove to Clontarf for this and was feeling well recovered from the 5km yesterday. The plan was initially to be 16km with a 3km w/u and another 3km c/d either end of the 10km @ MP but it was pretty windy so I chopped 1km off both ends as there was no need for that much slower running. 

The outward section was into the wind which thankfully wasn’t near as cold as recent weeks but was still pretty strong. After the first km I realised my HRM was not sending any HR feedback so I stopped and moistened the contacts on the strap. Unfortunately though this didn’t work. I decided to run on and see if it kicked in after a few minutes but I gave up on it soon enough and dcided to ignore it for the remainder of the run.

By 2km I was pretty much at MP without noticing it so that made it easier to start into the faster segment. Even thoug the wind was in my face I was still actually going faster than MP without a huge deal of effort. After 3km of this I became curious to see if my HR was elevated so seeing as the data still wasn’t showing on the watch I decided to stop and reset the watch/HRM by turning it off and on again. Surprisingly this did the trick and immediately my HR was displaying on the watch. So, I srted the watch for part 2 of the run while just having had a 30 second break.

After two more kms it was time to tournaround and thankfully I’d confirmed by now that the HR was in around 150bpm which happens to be my MP effort. Encouragingly though my pace had been about 5 secs per km quicker than MP… and that was into the wind! After turning the effort became a little easier and the splits were averaging 4:30/km. I finished my 10km @ MP and eased back but soon enough I felt well recovered and the pace only dropped to 4:54/km before I found myself without really noticing much of an effort back up at 4:30/km for the final split. It must be mentioned the wind was at my back but this felt so easy! Overall, including the slower splits, the average pace was 4:35/km -a couple of seconds inside MP.

So, a real confidence booster with a week to go. Hopefully we manage to get a tailwind all the way around the course now...too much to ask for on a loop course?? 

Week 14 Summary:
RTW: 6 from 7 days
DTW: 77.4 km
DTY: 1,186.0 km