“Okay. It is a little warm tonight so we will do a nice easy one”.

Yeah right! The mists of humidity had taken all afternoon to engulf downtown Doha and the relaxed walk to Sheraton Park had gotten me a little sticky. As I lay on the grass, post session – a hot, wet mess. I reflected on the variety of sessions I had gotten in this week. On Tuesday, I had rocked up to the Aspire Dome with a plan, an intervals plan.

MONDAY
Easy run – 4.5 miles in 52:25

TUESDAY
Speed intervals at Aspire Indoor

WEDNESDAY
10 mile cycle (36:35) and a strength and core session

THURSDAY
Easy tready run – 4 miles 48:55

FRIDAY
2am outside run 8.72 in 1:35 – endurance run for the week. Ran first 4/5 miles around marathon pace.

SATURDAY
Easy tready run – 5K 37:20

SUNDAY
10K at Aspire Indoor 1:03:12 – some past K’s in there too.

The King of Indoors’s Hot Wet Look

I am still pretty new to running intervals. In previous blocks of training, I have shirked the burden of Intervals through a lack of energy and interest. ‘I’m about distance, not speed’, ‘I’m too tired’, ‘I just want to go for a run’, ‘it’s too late, I’ll just go out and run 5 miles instead’ are all excuses I have used to justify the absence of this training element in the past.

But I have had to embrace the interval here. Years of running, a little slower than my target time due to a lack of speed and an unstructured training schedule has led to a small nugget of frustration, deep down inside. Plus excuses like ‘too hot, too late, too tired’ don’t really work when you are living out of a hotel , on the edge of a desert, during the hottest month of the year. You HAVE to train at night, unless you only train indoors – which can be boring and/or expensive.

So this is the session I planned on Tuesday (invented after reading a number of articles on the benefits of intervals and how to use them when you are training for distance).

4 x 200 meters (45 seconds a lap) 30 second rest

4 x 400 meters (1:30 seconds a lap) 200 meter rest

2 x 1600 meters (pacey) – 400 meter rest

 

About 6 people turned up to do the session I had posted, which was cool.

The session was hard but fun – 45 seconds is f.a.s.t. maybe a little too fast, but that’s the point right? Anyway, everybody did the session and everybody agreed that it was a “good session”. Awesome, I thought.

On Sunday, I went back to the dome for a 10K session. I managed to run the whole distance in just over an hour and had some fun company and chats as we slogged through 50 laps of the 200 meter track. It was a good session. So this week I feel like King of the Indoor Track.

However, although there was a good portion of ‘outside’, and they were good ‘outsides’ – I am not yet the King of that. Not with the humidity overlord bearing down. As I pushed through my boot camp session – easier this week (sort of) – well, there were no weights, just body stuff, the humidity overlord came at me with a trowel and a bucket of sweat, he was a child with a bowl of frosting, and I was the barren cake in which to decorate.

Millimeters felt like inches as my body grew a gelatinous layer of hot salty water. The session was hard, but I had plenty of water. Still, I came away from the session with my heart beating at 100 mph and my sports clothes had that wonderful ‘looks like he’s shit himself’ look which only extreme humidity can give one. It was just wet though.

Feel positive this week.