Everything seemed to be in place. I had provided sufficient motivation for the Colgate-Palmolive runners' group to get together for a long run that was a long time coming. I had designed some customised workouts to fit the course at National Park and everyone had their distances laid out and target times set. The appointed hour was 6:15am on Sunday and the venue, National Park gates. I hurried over, having got held up at the parking lot for my "Bullet", only to find that 3 runners had dropped out. I was not surprised but I was certainly dejected.
We did not allow this killjoy to affect our enthusiasm and got our run underway forthwith. I was to pace Aalok and we had 2 loops scheduled with a tempo burst thrown in to prepare him for a fast finish in his next race. I found much to my disappointment that Aalok was running a pace faster than I'd set for him. Much as I subtly tried to coax him to a slower pace, he seemed to speed up even more. I somehow felt that he thought, it was I that was tiring:-). As soon as we got to the tempo segment of the work out, Aalok seemed to find some unnatural groove and I barely kept pace. My subsequent entreaties to slow down as a 2nd loop is coming up, fell on deaf years. Predictably, Aalok ended up walking the last 4 kms.
Madhu, Roshni and Manisha succeeded with their individual work outs, except that Manisha had a sudden injury to her knee at the 9K mark. I returned home to a well-deserved beer and some brunch comprising ham, eggs, cheese and croissants that I'd got from "Hyper-City". We had a large and typical Sunday lunch at home with all the meats one can think of and a nice snooze after that veritable banquet:-) Evening involved taking Dojo and Monsoon for a drive thru' Aarey Colony where Dojo decided to find a nice spot to answer natures call and Monsoon struggled up some slopes with a walk that she felt was much needed after the Sunday lunch:-)
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