As I hinted in the last post, I ran a time trial this morning. I decided on 3 km, although I was a little worried it may have been too far. My old mate, the Hud, runs 3 km races on the track on Thursday nights, and these days he’s slowed to around 15  minutes (although he sometimes cracks that barrier). Given that I’ve not run a single kilometre in under 5 minutes in months, I figured I’d be happy with a pace similar to the Hud’s. To be fair, he’s nearly seven years older than me, so I should be faster than him when I’m fully fit, but I’m far from at my fittest at the moment.

So, off I headed – not without a little trepidation – to run my first time trial of the year. I actually ran a 9 km warmup at a good pace, before I even began the time trial. From the start I could tell I was doing OK. I was very pleased that, despite feeling pretty comfortable in the lungs throughout, I was still fast enough to finish in 12:53, with kilometres of 4:23, 4:21, and 4:09. I have to be honest and say that both the pelvis and Achilles gave signs of fatiguing, but I was able to hang on and finish strongly. As pleased as I was, the fact is, it’s not a fast time, but very satisfying under the circumstances (to put it in perspective, I ran a 10:08 on the same course three years ago).

This photo was taken six years ago to the day in Arizona, just four days before I reached the Grand Canyon. As you can see, I was running in shorts, because I hadn’t yet bought a pair of thermal long pants (I hadn’t expected snow in Arizona in late March). I recall stopping in at a Burger King to warm up around lunch time, and everyone was avoiding my like the plague, obviously thinking I was deranged to be out running in such conditions wearing shorts.