Wellington Masters 1500 m

Today was my first interclub tennis fixture of the post-Christmas competition. I played doubles with my daughter Hannah which we won comfortably 6-2, 6-2 in around an hour. In my singles I came back from 5-2 down to get ahead 6-5. I lost the next game but won the tie break 7-3. In the second set I raced away to a 4-1 lead but made heaps of errors and ended up losing the set 6-4. At 4-5 in that set my right calf went into cramp but Poweraide came to the rescue and allowed me to continue. The third set continued to be close. I went ahead 4-2 and eventually won 6-4. The singles match lasted just over 2 hours.

That amount of tennis was less than ideal preparation for a championship race. A long warm-up was called for and we got to the track in plenty of time for me to walk 2.5 km before the race. The first 2 km were really slow - over 8 min/km. I wasn't sure if I would manage anything like a sprint and was counting on adrenalin helping me out. It was hot and sunny at the track with a moderate breeze that did not affect things too much. I moved into 4th place but could hear people egging on Fraser who told me recently he had set his sights on beating me. That gave me incentive to keep pushing hard despite my weary legs. Fraser's coach was encouraging him to put on a great sprint in the last 100 m and the finishing judge decided we were 4th equal. The final results showed Fraser at 8:36:87 and me 11 hundredths of a second behind at 8:36:98. It's great to see a young walker finally coming through with some speed. It will be interesting to see if he can keep this pace going over the 3 km next week. (I will be trying to finish my tennis a bit quicker if I can but sometimes thoughts like that cause me to take risks and make more errors than I normally would.)

I did not see any warnings from the four judges today and I did not receive any penalties. Yay! Peter did say that my knees were a bit soft but not enough to warrant a red card. I'm not sure if that was the whole race or not.

I did wear my Garmin but I did not use it well. I turned the autolap off and then forgot to press the lap button at the end of laps 1 and 3. I also forgot to hit the stop/start button immediately after finishing. I will put it on but the data will not be very helpful.

Wellington Masters 1500 m

There was a 12 km training walk on my programme for today. I had planned to do about 4 km with the race and then do another 8 km later. Given my long tennis match today I decided not to walk any further in order to keep some energy for my 15 km tomorrow. I will try and do some stretches tonight and perhaps Philip will give me a massage.