Monday, May 21, 2007

Race in the storm

I probably have some debts to settle with the "God of Winds" ...
If I count my races in this season, they were all affected in one way or the other from a shitty weather: either 25C with 95% Humidity, either the NorEaster ....
The last race was not an exception ... the weather forecast was not good and actually was simply pouring heavy rain and strong wind.
The race itself was a local 8k and I did not have particular ambitions, but I wished at least to make a good warm-up !!!
In the 60 minutes leading to the start time, it was raining so heavy that I resolved to make only a last minute warm-up, so I challenged the rain with 20 minutes to go with some jog and strides.
It was not too bad either. .... I felt quite good in the first km and hang up very close to the leading pack. I was probably 10 second far away at the 2k mark when I started to fell better and THEY started to back off or better, to lose some pieces along the way. At halfway, we were very close and I caught them with 1km to go ....
very exciting. ..... a chance to win a race ... never happened before ...
but I was already at max rpm ...so when they kicked out for the final 500m I was stuck ...4th overall and 1st of the "Oldsters" ... not bad anyway

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Long morning run in a new environment

this morning I tried to make a long run in China on weekday, rather than in my usual way on weekends in HK.
It was also actually my first long run after the marathon.
Well, finding 20km of road to run in Soutch China is not easy at all, since the industrial development has been so massive in the past 20 years that basically all the roads (even minor) are leading to some factory, with a 24/7 traffic of trucks, containers, people, fumes, brrrrrrr
Anyway I did this venture and was a decent workout: I used Google Earth to find a minor road who looked promising and wake up very early (5am ....) to avoid meeting too much traffic. Now the daylight comes at 5.15am, so the roads were already busy with people going to wet markets or carrying out their small trades.
The road that I selected was not too bad, but it was anyway passing within several villages. So not really countryside, but just a collection of smelling villages and dust.
I made 21k @4'19" pace. The pace was probably closer to 4'11" but I had to slow down in some sections to cope with roadworks, traffic lights, etc, etc so a couple of Kilometres @4'30" slowed down the total pace.
I will try next time to bring the camera to post some pics.