Sparkie's rundiary

Thursday 29th December
With the quad giving me almost no grief for three days, I decided it was time to test it out a little. Headed down to Pennant Hills park to do some interval work (the exact nature of which would be determined when I got there). Did some solid stretching on the quads and hammies, and then did an easy 2km warm-up in about 8:40. Not a peep from the quad, which was good. Started some laps of surge the straights/walk the bends, but once I started to work things, the protests began (albeit mild). Ended up doing 4 laps of this - eight 100m intervals in all. Put the clock on the last few - 18 seconds, so roughly 3 min/km pace.

Deciding that the feedback was only tightness, I upped the interval distance to 200m, kept the pace the same, and did eight more. Held together fine, although protests continuted, and decided that nothing good was going to come from pushing it further, so warmed down and went home.

I missed my scheduled gym session, as I spent the afternoon rifling through an 85 year-old woman's underwear draw, which unfortunately isn't as humourous as it sounds, as I was helping my dad clean out my mother's, aunt's house, as she has recently been put into permanent care with dementia. Went to visit her later - a very heart-breaking thing to see such a vital healthy person deteriorate so quickly. I have a photo of her with Louis 12 months ago, but now she doesn't know who I am, let alone that I have a son. However, she was very pleased to have guests, and I will take Louis and his cousin up to see her next week, as she talked about how nice it was to see children running around. She was once matron at the school Queen Elizabeth was attending, which despite my dislike of royalty, is still a cool story.

Friday 30th December
This morning's run was a good one. Because yesterday was such a relatively easy session, I was jumping out of my skin this morning, and decided to do a modified multi-pace session. Warmed up for a km in 4:15, then ran 4km in 14:17 (3:39/3:50/3:18/3:30 - the varied pace having more to do with terrain than dodgy pacing). Recovered for 1km in 4:55, then did a 1km uphill in 3:32, before doing 2 easy km (5:04/4:22) to finish. Even with quite a few uphills, I never felt I had gone lactic in this session, which was very encouraging. Even more encouraging was that I didn't hear a peep out of my quad, indicating that yesterday's session didn't do any harm. Tomorrow I plan to do some longer work at the pace I ran yesterday - probably some ladders (200/400/600/800/600/400/200) at 72 seconds a lap. Then again - the CoolRunning 5km challenge is also on...

Louis and I are off to the pool today, along with another 2 year-old I somehow agreed to take with me.