Quick quick slow


After my longest run since before I left Singapore and then came back to Singapore, after a week of constantly drinking and then going spinning while hungover at the weekend, after staying up late watching every single episode of Children’s Hospital and playing too much Township, and after a day at work where I was in constant (and almost constantly aggravating) meetings until late late late, there was no better way that I could think of to relax than to go running at the track.

That oversimplifies things. I threw down my headset at 7:15 and went home, getting stuck in a conversation with a co-worker so I had to walk down Cecil Street instead of sprinting. Then when I extricated myself I had to rush through darkened alleyways (under wooden bridges, past tumbled walls to Innsmouth) back to my apartment building, where all the lifts were too slow, and people kept getting on and off. Then I got home, changed, tried to call a cab, had my phone crash, rebooted it, called a cab, lost my wallet, found my wallet, rushed out to the lift, got downstairs, waited for a taxi that should have arrived five minutes ago, and then got into a shiny new Hyundai Sonata driven by … an octogenarian who wanted to get me to my destination as slow as he possibly could. He still managed to drive erratically enough to petrify me, as well as doing that wonderful thing beloved by taxi drivers in Hong Kong and Singapore, of constantly pulsing the accelerator pedal so that the car continuously lurches along, rather than driving smoothly. (For a time I thought that was a feature of knackered old Toyota taxis, but the speed demon who drove me to Haneda in an old Toyota had no problem with keeping his foot solidly pinned to the floor, and my guy tonight was driving the newest taxi I’ve seen all week.)

So I arrived at the track 15 minutes late, nauseous, angry and terrified. But as chance would have it, I’d only missed the warm up laps, and it was one of my favourites tonight: 12x400m intervals. As a special bonus, we had 3 minutes and ten seconds to do each lap and recover, instead of the customary three minutes.

As is usual, the first lap felt much too easy, although even after 400 metres I knew there was trouble ahead. I started doing a 1:27 lap, declined to 1:30s, and then on the last lap the wheels fell off, or the arse fell out the back of me, or the good Lord no longer smiled upon my endeavours, and I did a 1:40 and could do no more.

Shortly, I’ll graph my laps and see how deceitful my memory can be, but the strangest thing right now is that my beard feels itchier than before it was trimmed. What mysterious razor did my barber use, to make this so?
400m repeats


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