Tuesday, 29 January - AV Shield

The last night meet of AV Shield tonight. My knee was a bit sore from yesterday and I am a bit worried that my knee injury is starting to come back. It never really went away, but it has been okay enough for me to run on it

Was a little bit sore from yesterday's racing, but still felt in reasonable shape this morning. I was pretty hungry and pigged on my usual morning tea of lollies

Couldn't get away from work until after 5:15 pm and with the program starting early, I wasn't able to get a good warm up in before the 1500 metres. Wanted to really push this one to see if I could break Luong's club best season time of 4:30 after getting pretty close last time around. Thankfully no Shane Jansen this time to spoil the party

Went out through 300 in 51 seconds, and then 700 metres in 2:03 for a 72 second lap, so up to that point exactly the same as the week before. Third lap was reasonably strong and at the bell it was 3:16 for another 72 second lap. Really started to hurt with 200 metres to go and didn't feel like I had any drive in the legs. Still a 73 second last lap had me at 4:29.77 at the finish and mission accomplished! One very happy Jegster afterwards - until I realised they would probably round up the time and have me at 4:30.0 when official results come out. Not to worry

WAs pretty stuffed afterwards, but still not back at peak fitness. It is a little frustrating that I feel like I am putting in maximum effort but getting not the same results

Anyhoo after that there was a good break to the relay's where I was in the Division 3 team. I was taking the baton from Mohammed Reese and had almost run out of sector before getting the baton, whereupon Mohammed pushed me squarely in the back. He said later that I had stopped running, but that was only because we were about to get disqualified! Anyway, it was a funny incident and in the end I only run the relays because we need the points

So we line up for the 3000 metres and they have combined the race, so you have like sixty runners on the staggered start lines. It was pretty ridiculous given you had 8 minute 3 km runners lining up with 15 minute 3 km runners. And we were even on schedule if only slightly behind to still finish in plenty of time for the last event at 9:00 pm. So wrong

Anyway, from the outset I kind of decided that I wanted to hurt in this one. I started off fairly quickly and just kinda made a concious decision from there to hare around the 7 laps that were left. It paid off big time in the end. Can't remember the 1 km split, but 2 km was 6:36. The last two laps were a bit of a struggle - at least itfelt that way. I remembered something that Stu Mac had said about my 5 km in that my stride shortened as the fatigue set in, so I tried to stay relaxed and keep a nice even stride going. Not sure what the final time was, but I think I did around 3:16 for the last kilometre for maybe 9:52. So about ten seconds off the pb and 8 seconds quicker than last time around. I was very, very rapt with that effort

Not so rapt with Carmel Taylor who - like Daniella Modesti the week before and Joshua Traine in the 5,000 metres a couple of weeks ago - ran a lap short. So it meant Carmel had to do another individual event to qualify for the final. She did the 400 metres and ran a great first 300 metres, before dark horse Heather Stewart stormed home to win the heat only .2 or so quicker than Jo Francken's season best. It shunted Jo down to number 3 in the 400 metre rankings, but none of us thought Heather had that kind of speed, least of all Heather

Did two laps warm down before getting a lift home with Rey, via McDonalds for him, and had my now customary egg and cheese on toast and peanut butter toast for dinner

May or not run tomorrow. The knee is a bit sore and probably should freshen up ahead of the Region Final on Saturday

TOTAL DISTANCE = about 6 kilometres