25th August, 12.5km, 60min, Vomero

With our 5yo having his birthday party at our house this afternoon, I had to skip the city training run. So in replacement I was up early to run the local streets.

To start with I felt terribly flat, I even yawned while running - how bad is that. With a gentle uphill to start I was barely lifting the legs in the hope of just working into it, knowing there was a long downhill not too far along.

Got a decent rhythm going and even found I could hold pace on the next long steady uphill section. Perhaps it was something to do with the growing daylight....

I got to the top of a very steep and straight downhill on Hull Rd to the Lilydale Lake wetlands. At that moment I had a stupid thought that this hill could make for a good long hill repeats - stupid - stupid runner. At the bottom, what did I do?? Yep - turned around and went back up to get a 'split' to compare against. MMR suggests is about 350m, split was just under 2min.
If you have ever checked the .csv raw data from MMR then mucked around to get the gradient % for various climbs, it can be interesting. On this hill though I think the accuracy of the information surely can be questioned. I know this hill is steep, but it suggests the middle section of this hill is 25% gradient - is this possible???

On this uphill, I had a memory of a Lance armstrong philosophy in climbing. He would talk about 'tapping a rhythm' when climbing a big mountain, it was all about monotonously outlasting the competition. Today I 'tapped' up this hill - it helped that the gradient is such that there is no choice but to be on your toes. It was a good feeling.

The rest of the run was nice. Bright morning, fresh air. Got home without being quite sure how long I'd been going since the only measurement was my SDM footpod - hard to read on the go... It was a nice feeling to see 1hr tick over, it seemed like a good time to stop.

No niggles, no problems. Feeling comfortable in the lead up to MM07. Strangely I feel more nervous at this point than last year. I guess that is through the burden of responsibility, all the more reason to make sure my preparation is of suitable quality.