Big Off Season Weekend

Had a big weekend of sport this weekend.  First, a bit of an update:

Cross country season is now in full swing.  To start off, I have been running the middle distance events, normally 3km.  Had been struggling, with a pace of slower than 5 min/km.  Then I took a week off to get married, came back last week, and ran 2.5km in 11:39, a pace of 4:39/km.  That led to a few friendly jokes about how married life is doing me good. :)

So back to this weekend.  Yesterday was a “distance handicap”, where each runner runs a difference according to their ability.  I entered the “3km” event, and was given a handicap distance of 2.96km to run.  Started out strong on the 1km uphill stretch.  The middle part of the event was undulating, before the 1km downhill run home.  Although the downhill stretch made things easier, I pushed it pretty hard.  Ended up completing the race in 13:59, at a pace of 4:43/min, and scoring third place on handicap.

Today was a track meet, to celebrate the re-opening of the local track, after being resurfaced.  I entered the 2 sprints offered, namely 200 and 100 metres, as well as long and high jump, and discus.

First up was the 200m.  Ran well, probably around 27 seconds, but I will never know, because the electronic timing system crashed (which has never happened before), so we had to run it again.  10 minutes later was the re-run, which was a lot slower.  10 minutes wasn’t enough time to recover from a 200m, and the time was a lot slower - 30.33.  It was more like a speed endurance training run.

After the 200m, I struggled over to the long jump.  As I was still recovering, the first jump was only about 3.2 metres, and the second was between 3.6 and 3.7m.  Had a longer jump for the third attempt, but was 1cm over the board, making it a no jump.  I got a measure for curiosity, and it would have been around 4 metres.  But 3.6 something will have to do.

Next up was high jump.  I haven’t done this since the decathlon, but wanted to give it another go.  I opted for an easy starting height of 1.10m, and worked my way up to 1,25m easily.  By now it was close to the time for the 100m, so I rushed 2 attempts at 1.30m, before retiring.

I used the 100m trip to the start of the 100m at a warmup run, and had another run through, before the race started.  Ran 13.76, suspecting this was affected by going lactic in the 200m re-run.

Final event was discus.  Here, I had my first go at throwing my new weight - 1.5kg for us over 50s, down from 2kg.  The smaller discus suits me, and I threw a PB of 17.95m on my third attempt. 

The new track felt really good, though the incident with the 200m made it hard to see how I’m tracking in terms of training, or the effect of the track on performance.  Hopefully there will be another meet before too long.

- Tony via Tumblr https://ift.tt/2xfXCiC