It's all too beautiful

Two weeks into the new programAnd things are particularly sweet.

As I suspected, Pat's program seems to be suting me well.

On Friday Pat set me 4 1K efforts @ 4:30 and 2 500m efforts @ 2:05. This seesion was an absolute killer. My splits were:

1K:
4:29
4:30
4:28
4:32

500m
2:08
2:03

At the end of it I was just about ready to barf up a lung. I'm really impressed in how quickly Pat has been able to gauge what target times he needed to set to really challenge me.

The only instruction on the long run has been to go for 2:10. So far my two long runs on the program have done this in beautifully different ways.

Last Sunday I found myself out at Copacabana, which gave me an opportunity to go trail running at Mt Bouddi. I had an awesome 14K run with walk breaks on some really rugged coastal bush. 14K in 2:10 doesn't souns much, but I was still feeling it 2 days later. It was a top run.

This Sunday I took up my pre-paid entry in the SMH Half with the intention of using it as a 2:10 training run.

I stopped my watch at 2:10:00.96 - how good is that? I ran most of the race chatting with various Coolrunners, then did more of the same at the pub. Tiger Angel and Gnome, it was great to see you both - especially with both of you now running in the right direction health wise!

Then DJ and the kids came into town and we had one of our excellent post race days in the city.

Speaking of the kids, the twins have run the West Met 2K Cross Country race for the last 2 weeks, and it looks like they would like to stick with it. This is a great little series - you just turn up, pay $2 each, run your race and go home. It only takes an hour or two out of your Saturday and it's a great one for running with the kids. They are learning to pace themselves much better, and hopefully this will see them stick with it - I love sharing running with the girls.

They asked me if they could start calling me Dad on Monday. That's a pretty special moment in the life of a step-parent.

It was on the way home from the West Met race yesterday that "Itchycoo Park" came on the radio. Although it's well before my time, I grew up listening to the Small Faces, but never before has the lyric "It's all too beautiful" resonated so clearly - and I wasn't even under the influence of mind altering substances!