The three months since China have flown by with a maelstrom of work, the health of my mother, maintaining running and an increasingly ambitious list of languages that I have been learning. Though time has been at a huge premium, I still haven't really thought about cutting back the discretionary time use (largely the latter two, running and languages) to allow a bit more rest and de-stressing.
That being said, this period has been extremely productive, nonetheless. For the running, the time between arrival back and early April had seemed a bit of a malaise. My recovery from my fall in China was smooth once I knew that it was a mild strain and nothing more and I even ran 20km a few days after the last post without issue. But compared to last year, I just was not hitting my paces. It was disconcerting in fact to see what I was casually hitting in training a year prior - I almost hadn't realised for a while that I had been that quick.
As my first event post-China approached in April, I knew I wasn't going to match previous year's effort. It was the Waterfront Half, an event where literally every time I had run it I had got an improvement in my lifetime personal best time. But this year was going to be the first time to fall short: 1:27:17, over a minute short of my 1:25:55, which was unbelievable for me at the time.
As I had already low expectations, I was still satisfied though, and even thought it was a "win" because I only had a slight slowdown toward the end.
But the event seemed to have been just the tonic I needed. Almost all the training runs after it were popping; so much so that as I approached the first race of the Run Auckland 10km series, I was quite optimistic to match my race time of the previous year.
Last year, the Ambury Farm 10km had been my first serious 10km race in years. The course was flat, good, but almost entirely gravel, bad. I had locked into a pace, trying to break 40:00 for the first time, and was rewarded with 40:12, and a surprising 5th place. Even more surprising was that one second behind my time was a speedy 12 year old, who I'll refer to with his initials, AF. AF was even faster in the subsequent two races beating me and most of the field with ease. Only a few adults could consistently place ahead of him, which did not include me. He had a stress fracture half-way through the series but had recovered and was back running at pace.
This year was almost a re-run run of last year, but even faster. I locked in a sub 4:00/km pace and generally managed to keep it there:
AF was leading for the first few kilometres but fell back slowly in the placings as the race progressed. At about the same point as last year, 7.2km mark, I ground past him, and held a solid closing pace to finish 38:55, in 7th place, this time beating AF by 7 seconds.
