"That's good running, mate!"

On location this week at Whakatane.

Managed to fit in two runs (a 13.8km run around town on Tuesday at dusk and a 6km shorter version the night after). The first of which got me the above verbal pat on the back from a local runner. More on that later in this post.

Firstly here is a picture of Whakatane river taken at dawn on my cell phone camera. It is looking East out towards the heads and the wharf. My Whakatane runs start on the other end of the wharf and follows the track along the river. It is a nice stretch with the boats and water to run past.



My Tuesday night run was a newer route I had mapped out the night before.



Near the start I was saw another running start the track and I was keeping pace with them but at the start of the grass track (perhaps around 500m into the route) he took off on what must have been about 4 min/km pace. The grass track is really two terraced sections. I took the low road as such and had a little mini-race with the local :). At around the 3km point in my route the terraces converge before the road and bridge. At this point the runner says to me "that's good running mate!" and turns around and hares off back along the river.

Feeling pretty chuffed by the compliment I then realised that the fast pace is hard work and essentially plodded around the rest of the course. I guess that is a lesson in racing about not starting to quickly as it is hard to recover from it (it says that in the half marathon book alluded to in the last post).

The rest of the run was fairly sedate but I passed my new running friend at the 11km and got a friendly wave. Whakatane is a friendly town but in general when you pass a fellow runner a nod, smile, or "gidday" is normal. It's an exercise fraternity of sorts.

The run the following day was a route I had done previously. I tried a bit of ad-hoc intervals which basically meant 3 or 4 all out sprints for 100m intervals interspersed along the run. Wasn't very scientific but it was quite hard work and the subsequent recovery periods were slower than usual. After some research I will be incorporating some better thought out interval training into my running program.

All in all a good trip down to Whakatane this week.