"Nine Mile Track"

Its been a reasonably good last two weeks with short runs, a couple of trips out on the bike and also a couple of tremendous track sessions,including last Tuesday's which added up to nine miles and me finishing long after it had got dark!

The time between the end of the track season and the start of the cross country season is always an interesting one, do you stick with speed on the track or start to introduce some more endurance work? The answer from the coach last Tuesday was the latter! With a large bunch of athletes to work with, including two who have recently won international vests on the fells it was always going to be a hard and competitive session. After a two mile warm up and a couple of miles including drills and fartlek it was down to the main effortbased around 6 x 400 (with 30 secs recover) then 800m, with two minutes between sets. I was going well over the early 400s but the session really began to string out as time went on, including a couple of athletes who dropped out. I dug in, stuck to the recoveries and held on to the finish and cooled down over two miles, went home, put my feet up and promptly crashed out to find the rest of the family had gone to bed several hours before!

The track season is also over when you hear the club champs results and unfortunately I dropped from first to third in the vets ranks. I can't be disappointed as I missed a couple of keys meetings, not to mention quite a few weeks of training due to work. However I intend to have a good winter season and see if I can take the title back next year.

Next week it's the start of the cross country season and no doubt a long hard winter of training and racing, The following week it's the fantastic "World Wide Festival of Races" which I hope to compete in by entering the Congleton Half Marathon.

Weekly mileage 20. Annual mileage 967.