It's a fine line between pleasure and pain
You've done it once, you can do it again
Whatever you done don't try to explain
It's a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain
('Pleasure and Pain' - The Divinyls)
Thanks for the comments, folks.
I've two more runs to report since race day. I took a whole week off from running following the mara, closely scrutinised by Mrs MCLMM who insisted I needed to be "fully rested" before attempting another run. Good advice, as last year I returned to training way too soon and pulled a calf muscle which resulted in two weeks enforced rest at a most inconvenient time. So having SWMBO keeping an eye out for tell-tale sweaty socks was a wholly good idea.
It is true however that I was itching to get back into it, and so last Sunday - a full seven days since the marathon - I laced up the Brooks for a lazy ten, just to get back into the swing of things and remind the legs that they still had a few more races on the calendar this year. The first half hour, it has to be said, felt a little weird, but after that it felt pretty good, and I completed a straight-forward, fairly slow 10km in 64 minutes and felt satisfied at having 'returned to the fold'. It may have only been a week, but it felt more like a month that I'd taken off.
After the compulsory rest day yesterday, I leapt back into the fray for a much more interesting tempo run. Again it was relatively simple 10km jaunt (nothing too taxing), but this time I built it up as I went from a lazy jog to a trot, to a regular training pace and then to a sprint and finally a flat out sprint to wrap it up in 55 and a half minutes. And boy did it feel great! My fastest 10km since January and it really felt good - very, very happy with this run, and I went to work afterwards feeling on top of the world. When running is going well there's hardly a feeling like it - just glorious!
So now I have 25 days to the Sydney Half Marathon. After today's run I'm entertaining ideas of maybe a PB attempt, although to be honest I'm not in exactly the kind of form I was for my PB run last year. But we'll see. Because I was so late entering the race, I had to get an entry in the last wave, along with the also-rans and pram-pushers. Well, not quite that bad, but there'll be a lot of traffic to get through - this wave is not exactly your sub-2hr group. Whatever happens, I'm sure it will be fun.
Track du Jour: Can't let the moment go without saying "Vale Chrissy Amphlett" - taken from us way too soon ... and this song seems runningly appropriate. Enjoy!
10km 1h04:37
10km 0h55:39
YTD: 556.1km
Orange Silver April
