Colour me impressed

It was my intention to talk about wetsuits today and the time I spent swimming in one yesterday morning. But I am not going to. Ha ha, fooled you!!!

Well okay, I will still talk about it, but it might have to wait until tomorrow. For now I wanted to write about something quite impressive that I watched today.

My prediction about a tough run this morning turned out to be true. It was a fairly solid session and my run from yesterday morning did come back to bite me a little, but not catastrophically. However, my session wasn't the impressive thing. The impressive thing was watching the other guys I was running with. I mentioned last week that some of the guys I run with are training for the Fukuoka Marathon. Now these guys are seriously fast. Qualifying for Fukuoka is 2 hours 40, that is averaging 3 minutes 47 seconds for those who are wondering. That is the slowest these guys run. The fastest there this morning would be a comfortable sub 2hrs 30min marathon runner. This morning the Fukuoka guys were doing a 25km pacing session. 25km at marathon race pace. I did about 8km with some of the 'slower' guys as a chance to work on absolute pace and what these guys do just blows me away. The ease at which they run ridiculously quickly made me very jealous and just a little inspired. They are ticking along at tempo while my lungs are exploding. 8km (one lap of the course) at their marathon pace was about all I could manage.

I know I will never run as fast as these guys, I have to spend a little bit of time swimming and riding during the week, which tends to cut into run training time. Plus I  don't really have to be able to run that fast due to the nature of Ironman racing. But watching them made me keen to keep on improving my running. Seeing them run this morning really hit home that there are people who run this way. They aren't just little people on the TV, but actual real people. Of course I have always known that people run fast during a marathon, but knowing it and seeing it first hand are different things. 

So that was this morning. Right now I am sitting inside my air conditioned house gathering the courage to go down the pool in about an hour for the Saturday afternoon Swim Smooth session. The reason I am gathering courage is that it is currently about as hot as the sun outside (okay, about 38 degrees). Just a nice little preview of what Summer has in store. Today is the first really hot day we have had this season and it taking some adjusting. At least it isn't a proper Summer hot spell, really just hot today before cooling down tomorrow. Swimming should be good (we will be in a pool after all), but the idea of deliberately going outside is not appealing. Definitely a session for wearing sunscreen.

Could be worse I guess. I could be up in Langkawi racing the Malaysian Ironman...