Saturday, October 17, 2009

New cycling route and SCSM training run

This was a tricky week mainly because I had many guests in town for a symposium. Between hosting lunches, dinners, research seminars and of course the symposium, I had to juggle my schedule around. In reverse order, this was what I did this week:

Sun - a 44 km ride covering the same Mandai route as last week, with the addition of a detour to the end of Rifle Range Road. IN first suggested this a couple of weeks ago. Apparently TriBob uses this training route frequently; in fact, during our 36 km run last week, we saw a number of cyclists going up and down RRR.

From the BTVC, the road starting inclining, gradually at first and then increasing in gradient. The slope was not that bad, but it was the length of it that sapped our energy. In fact, I felt the burn in my quads (the left in particular), the first in many months since I'd felt that. Two nice declines, especially the last, where we reached a top speed of 48 kph. That meant that we had a tough first incline to negotiate on the way back. PK was very strong on RRR - overtook me and holding the lead to the end, and then putting a large lead on the way back. What would he do with a better bike?!

Great training route - the 3.5km long RRR. Was hesitant on the descent as I couldn't see very well in the early hours of the morning. And I didn't know the lay of the land too well.

Sat - a 22 km PMC run with DW and OPK. OPK ran just 5 km, and returned to PMC. The two of us slogged through the increasingly hot morning, at a modest pace of about 8 min/km. Took a couple of breaks, finishing in over 3 hours. This was the second in our training runs in the lead up to the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon for PMC running community

Fri - R&R

Thu - R&R

Wed - 8.5km trail run with increasing pace.

Tue - 30 lap easy swim

Mon - R&R

I guess the key question is how do my legs feel? They felt much better this week, even though I did 36k last Sat compared to the previous 30k. No pain in the right knee, which was a relief. Still some stiffness so I did a lot of stretches on the off days. The weekend workouts were good to burn off all the excess calories I took in during the week as a result of hosting lunches and dinners.

Nothing much to do except to taper for NF100 next Sat.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow - you're clocking up plenty of km this month... did you decide about Tokyo yet?

BFG said...

Hi, Marty. My running mileage has come down a fair bit this year as I focused more on swimming and biking.

As for Tokyo, it is unlikely from the looks of things. Still have till the end of the month to decide. But if I do make it, then we should definitely plan to meet!