sam and the city

Competitive spirit

Good day faithful readers. I must first apologise for not keep up my end of the deal in this relationship. That is, providing you with something entertaining to read on a regular basis. The reason for this is that for one reason or another I seem to have had no time to do anything over the last week. I have to start work in an hour, but I thought that I would take the chance to jot down a few words.

Last night I went for my third run with the Serpentine Running Club and did the 3-Parks run. I've decided that there is no way around it, my run with the club is going to have to be my fast run of the week. Last week I was feeling a bit tired, so I thought that I would do an easy run, and as such I put myself in the 8:00/mile (5:00/km) group, which is a pace that I can maintain very easily. The problem was that I found that I had to run nearly flat out just to keep up. By the end of the 7.25 miles I had averaged 4:38/km.

The problem I think is that sports people by their very nature are competitive people, so when you run with a group of people that you don't really know, there is a tendancy for a steady jog to turn into a race. If you're running with someone that you know then you know where you stand comparatively and won't bother pushing if you know your running partner can easily beat you. When you're running with someone that you don't know though you find that you're constantly testing the person/people that you're running with looking for a little sign of weakness that you might be able to exploit. More often than not it just results in everyone running much faster than they had intended.

This-morning I went for the longest run of my training program so far, 28km. Generally speaking you're supposed to take it relatively easy prior to a long run, so running with the club yesterday probably wasn't the best preparation. Unfortunately it was forced on me by a change in roster. Nevertheless, I did the required number of kilometers, but I was starting to feel a little tired at the end.

Next week I shall be off to France and Spain, so I'm pretty excited about that. Hopefully I'll have some good stories and nice photos to show you all when I get back. I'm not exactly sure what my internet access will be like during this time, so if you don't hear from me for a little bit then I apologise in advance. Until next time.

posted by sam @ 2:09 pm