Andrew is getting fit

My parents came to Auckland for the weekend to visit their favourite (and only) grandchild and it has become a bit of a tradition that my dad and I find a race to run when he visits.  My mum and wife have also become keen on running over the last year or so, so we thought we’d find an event where everyone could do something.

The Sri Chinmoy folks have a quarterly event in the Auckland Domain and my wife, dad and myself entered the 10K and my mum entered the 5K.

Unfortunately it turned out that our babysitter (aka the other grandma) had to go to a religious service so I ended up supervising my monkey instead of running.  It was fun having her cheer for her mother as she ran past us but she didn’t quite get the hang of it as her cheer was “Mummy!  No run away – come back!”

It was a smallish event but one of the things I liked was the little signs with sayings of Sri Chinmoy.  I liked this one for some reason:

My wife did the 10K race and set a new and inaugral PR of 57:29 and in so doing she also smashed her 5K PR – unfortunately she can’t quite remember the exact seconds but she saw the clock was saying 28 minutes something when she went by at the 5K mark and her previous 5K mark was 29 something.

Here she is on her final lap:

My mum and dad had good races as well and once they were all done I handed off my daughter and ran home (the long way).

I normally do my long runs on Sunday but because of the racing and other events on yesterday I only did my long run this morning.  I took the day off from work as my parents were still here.  I snuck out of the house at about 6:00 am and did a loop around the city.

The first half was along the coast and was pretty spectacular.  The weather was perfect and it was just great.  The second half was through the city and suburbia and while it was pretty good I hit rush hour and kept having to wait at traffic lights which was a trifle annoying.

I think I forgot to restart my watch after one of the lights as when I mapped out my route it said that I should be doing about 30.4 km but my GPS watch said I only did 29km which is a bit of a discrepancy.  Anyway, 30km in 3:08:09.

That’s week 11 of my marathon training program done now. I did 73.8 km over the last 7 days which is not to be sneezed at.  I’ve done 278 kilometres over the last 30 days.  Marathon training sure does help the mileage climb!

After I got home from my run I took the family out to Wenderholm national park for a picnic lunch and a bit of a hike.

Unfortunately my monkey refused to walk so I ended up carrying her on the hike.  The route we took went up a rather steep hill:

We started off from the car park next to the river so you can see we climbed a fair distance!  I think I earned the ice cream I had on the way home!

Week 12 of my marathon training program is a step back week so mileage on all the runs is much reduced and I only have to run a half marathon distance this coming Sunday.

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Tags: Marathon Training, running // 11 Comments »