Good and Solid

A good, solid kind of exercise day today. The later part of this week is going to start getting a bit hectic with coaching type activities, so it has been great to have a quiet start to the week where I can just sit back and enjoy some outdoor activities.

My outdoor endeavors today involved a paddle on the board this morning and a 12km run for lunch.

The paddle bit was fun enough. I am currently trialing a flatwater race board from a local board manufacturer called Yob. The board is a bit tippier than my normal board, but also a bit quicker and so it has been quite a lot of fun heading out and challenging myself with the instability, but also seeing just how fast it can go (pretty quick is the answer). I have been surprised to see that the flatwater specific board is at least half a kilometer an hour quicker than the board I currently paddle, which is a big difference when you are only talking 8 to 9km/h total speed. It translates to a good 6% gain in speed, which I guess is like going from a road bike to a TT bike. That is probably not too bad an analogy actually. Anyway, I know this is a triathlon blog, but if anyone is into standup paddling then they might find that interesting.

For my run today I thought I would try something a little bit different. Usually when I run I head out once I have got home from work. Running this way works alright, but it is always a real mental struggle to get myself out the door after finally getting home to see the family. So today I thought I would try and go for a run from work at lunchtime.

Running at lunch is something that I have done before, years ago it was my norm, but recently I have got out of the habit. Half of the year in Perth it is too hot to run in the middle of the day and at the peak of my training my runs were too long to fit them into a lunch break. But now the weather is lovely and I am only running 12km or so, so running during the day is actually quite a neat solution.

Plus where I work is quite ideally situated for running. My office is basically next door to a big metropolitan park called King's Park, think Central Park in New York but bigger and with much bigger hills. We are actually quite lucky to have such a great public space right in the heart of the city, but I think most Perthites are so used to it that we stop seeing it. Nonetheless it is a great place for exercise. The Park is full of paths, trails and tracks, the only downside is that it is also full of hills, which makes it hard to go for an easy run. It is too good a spot to ignore though.

For today's run I went for a lazy lap of the Park, which netted me about 12km. You can get more, but that usually involves a bit of wandering along the maze of tracks in there (most of which are up or down a hill), which I wasn't really in the mood for today.

The run went well enough that I think I might plan to do it again on Thursday. Plus, having the run already done means that I can head home and just relax, no rushing out the door to try and fit a run in this evening. Very nice.