Tapering and a few short races

Le Cheile Ladies & Gents Senior Teams

The weekend of the Donadea 50K marked the start of my Taper and to finish of that weekend I took part in the Kildare Road Race Championships Intermediate & Masters which was a short but fast 6K.  I was conscious of the previous days race being still in my legs and was prepared to drop out if needs be and planned on running easy to start rather than going all out and deciding on my pace based on how I felt after the first kilometer.  Didn't feel too good running to the start line during my warm up but felt good once the race started and pushed on to finish in 6th place and 1st over 40 in 21:53 and to make things even better our team finished 3rd with the ladies team also finishing 3rd.  Only seconds slower than last year and much better than I expected.

Le Cheile Ladies Team

Training volume has since reduced with lots of shorter but slightly faster runs of around 10K with the occasional longer run which I'm scaling down from 30K as the ACP gets closer.

Today I ran in the Kildare Senior Road Race Championships, a 10K which was hosted by my own club Le Cheile.  With the recent reduced volume I'm feeling better than usual as the legs get a chance to rest and recover so I knew there was a chance of doing well in this race but I also needed to keep my eye on the bigger picture and think about the race I'm training for in 2 weeks time.  I declared my time of 36mins to 36:30 before the race thinking that this was realistic and wouldn't be causing any unnecessary  stress or post race recovery.

I was hoping that a definite lead group would break away from the start and the temptation to race just wouldn't be there but my conservative fast pace still had me with the lead pack so with less than 1K covered I made the decision to drop back and run as planned.

It became obvious after the first half that I could have stayed with the lead pack as they never got further than 30M away and I even made up a few places as 2 guys fell back.  I was now in fifth place and contemplating making a push within the last 2K but decided against it and in the approach to the last 1K as the race doubled back towards the finish I could see that the lead pack had split and all were running at a faster pace and it was faster than I could have managed and I was glad that I held back as it would have been for nothing and would have cost me.
Finished in fifth place with 36min17sec and the team finished in 2nd place.  My time was 22 seconds faster than my win in Ballybunion last year so all in all it was a good day.
Garmin Connect for 10K Race.