After a speedy week in Week 7, this week is all about hills.

Monday
REST

Tuesday
REST (again)

WEDNESDAY
Spin – better 🙂

Thursday
Hill workout failure – still tired. Ended up doing some core and strength

Friday
Bootcamp – awesome 😀

Saturday
Long run – 18.6K – with laps of Crazy Hill

Sunday
Bootcamp – Glutton for punishment

The undulation of the psyche

Hitting 31 miles last week and finishing it off with a nice pacey track session on the Sunday, I found I was a little on the fatigued side. So I took a well deserved rest day on Monday. However, my valley of fatigue was deeper than it looked and my Tuesday run was abandoned as I could not keep my eyes open beyond 9pm. I did not sleep very much at all going into Wednesday which made my hill climb out of the valley of the knackered more like an Everest ascent.

Nothing like a good bit of spin

‘Now let’s go for a run’ said the instructor. Which was nice to hear, even though we were on the bike. What she meant was ‘here is a nice flat/downhill recovery bit and we are going to have a bit of fun to stretch out those legs’. I had forgotten how much I enjoy doing Spin classes and now I know it is easy to get involved with here, I will make it a regular part of my cross training. I was very very tired at the end of it though, although the free fruit at the gym reception went a long way to helping.

Cliff-hanger

Fucked Thursday caught me this week. I think a combination of the Spin, my fatigue and not enough carbs formed an evil alliance and quite literally stopped me in my treadmill track. But as I plummeted over the edge of the precipice I found something to grab on to, Friday’s bootcamp was fun. We played Soccer to warm up, which was fun (I know right. Me + Soccer usually = bad times) and the class had a bit of boxing which was also fun. I found myself channeling bootcamp Daniel – don’t let him know that.

The Saturday run

I posted my plans to run on the DBRC facebook page and to my surprise I got a few takers. Three of us set out on the route I had planned from my Hotel. The Swede – who also works at the same TV station as me (small world ah!?) and this Filipino guy who runs ultras like they’re Parkrun’s.

We wove our way through the back streets of Doha, weaving our way away from the humidity on the Corniche and towards the less humid (fingers crossed) and hilly Crazy Hill.

I had asked that we keep it slow, around the 7min/K mark which in old money is 11:30min/mile. We ended up running splits closer to 8 than 7, but on reflection our pace was pretty consistent throughout the entire 18Ks. Yes, there were some walking sections but it was frickin’ 75% humidity with a ‘feels like’ temp approaching 50. We ran past this really looking posh mall called Alhazm, I have grabbed a photo off your website. It’s dead impressive – all Italian looking with this funky glass pyramid out the front which looks like the Louvre. The Swede said that it’s really expensive – high-end shit (he didn’t say that). And it looks well built. It’s quite funny, in a way. They have found the highest point in Doha, a point with a pretty good view of the bay too and stuck a super-high end mall on top of it.

I have posted a link to my run data. We were out for 2 1/2 hours and covered the distance I wanted to. It’s an awesome run, I think I will run that route again and I think the three of us will run again too.

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/866788462/share/0?lang=en

Sunday (today) I did another bootcamp session. This week has been very cross training focussed and I am feeling stronger. Ok, so my mileage is extremely low this week, but next week will be better.

Sunday’s bootcamp btw, wrecked me. Totally wrecked – I was thinking of going to Aspire after for a track run but I spent the 30mins post BC rehydrating and getting my heart-rate down. I’ll be sore tomorrow.