Sunday, August 5, 2012

20 km Training Walk

I got up at 7:00 am this morning and mixed up a double mixture of blueberry pancake mix to take round to Bart's place. The plan was to have a shared breakfast then watch the Olympic Men's 20 km Walk which Bart recorded during the night.

We watched the exciting finish of the men's 10,000m then the race walk.  The course looked so narrow and crowded for the first 8 km or so. We managed to spot Peter Wrigley from our Scottish Athletics club just once or twice even though the judges were pretty active with their warnings. I enjoyed watching the race. It was pretty tactical and a good example of the risks of going too hard early in the race.

After the race ended we headed home to get ready for this training session.  We parked the car near the bus station, planning to walk round the bays to Island Bay then catch the bus back to town after lunch at one of our favourite cafes. The streets were crowded with people taking advantage of a lovely day but every one was considerate and I wasn't held up. Philip went a different route to me at the start and I had to work hard to catch him up. I was averaging around 6:35 at the 8 km mark but lost my momentum when I had to stop a few minutes for traffic lights on a main road.  I kept trying to keep a reasonable pace and managed to finish in a few seconds over 2:20 - my best 20 km training session by about 2.5 mins. Perhaps I was a bit inspired by the walking I had viewed earlier in the day.  Average pace 7:00/km, average HR 136 bpm.

20 km Training Walk

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