8 miles tempo

I finally got tired of the HTC Touch Diamond's poor GPS accuracy and battery life when used with Run.GPS, and it had also occurred to me that Ben seems to be able to get accurate splits when running along the Kelvin Walkway, so I got a Garmin Forerunner 305. I had a 101 which had terrible signal trouble with the trees along Great Western Road, and it just wasn't worth the hassle even though I really liked the training partner feature, but the 305 supposedly has a more sensitive GPS receiver, so armed with some gift vouchers for Greaves who had no running shoes I was interested in, I thought it would be worth a try. I switched it on at home with the intention of leaving it beside the window for a few minutes to see if it could pick up satellites from there like the Touch Diamond could. After I had completed the initial setup, the unit was supposed to locate the satellites, but it went straight to the timer screen. I eventually worked out that it had already picked up a signal even though I had been standing in the middle of the room. I set it to auto-lap every mile and drove up to training - decided against running there as I thought the session would be likely to finish quite late.

I arrived just as coach Lesley was going out for a run, which she kindly interrupted to tell me the fast pack had already been sent out due to low numbers, and she gave me a quick summary of the route. I set off in pursuit, expecting maybe to see the others in the distance at best, but it turned out that the top two packs had been combined into one, and they had set off at a steady enough pace that I caught up with them at the Porsche garage. It turned out that everybody who had taken part in Tuesday's session was complaining about sore legs, which might also have accounted for the attendance being down. The rest of the route took us along Drumchapel Road and Alderman Road, down Lincoln Road and back up Anniesland Road. The pace increased gradually along Alderman Road, and as the post-football hip problems I had been worried about hadn't materialised, when I felt quite fit all of a sudden going up the hill on Anniesland Road, I broke away from the pack and maintained a brisk pace all the way to the finish. Had some minor strains afterwards but nothing serious. I thought finishing ahead of the pack might have staved off relegation after some poor recent performances, but unfortunately none of the coaches was around to see. Distance was 7.99 miles, time 54:01 for a 6:46/mile average. Splits: 6:59, 6:59, 7:11, 7:07, 6:47, 6:35, 6:11, 6:07.