A hard session!

16M double; tempo session & recovery run
11M (18K) am tempo session at ~5.45min/M
5M pm recovery run at ~7.00min/M

We were woken at 6 this morning for my first hard session of the trip. The deal is that the club has a minibus (the one that picked me up from the airport) and rounds up all the athletes three times a week for the hard sessions.

The coach (Mersha) was on board and set out our plan once we'd arrived at our training location.

I wasn't entirely clear on everyone's plan, but was told it was an hour long run and I should run at 4.30min/K ish.

From fairly early on it seemed that the others were aiming for something a fair bit faster, and I was feeling ok and decided to stick with them. I ended up running it as a tempo run and came out with an average pace of 5.45min/M over the 18K (11M) course. A table I found in Lore of Running suggests that the 2300m altitude makes the correction per mile 20-25 seconds. Given the rocky terrain (though it was a road) and my new arrival at altitude, I was chuffed. The coach was too, and told me I 'could join the group'. I was ahead of a number of the local guys (though I don't have a clue how hard they were trying... I was running my guts out).

The afternoon was fun too. Another young athlete who has now moved on from the Running Across Borders group to train with the Ethiopian National Team came over. He is a very fast 5000 and 10000 runner. Perhaps no coincidence since he is Bekele's 1st cousin...

Gudisa and I ran a nice 5 or so miler in the evening. I had a splitting headache. Either due to the altitude or the morning's exertions. But it seemed to fade in the evening.