Northern Indoor 3000m

Having been grinding out long hard sessions and long fairly long tempos over the last few months I fancied a run out to see where I was at off the back of that training. This week saw the start of some slightly more specific work- the group is moving from the longer sessions into alternating between 20x400 and shorter faster hills on a Tuesday, tempo on a Thursday and longer grass work on a Saturday. I'm not sure where that will fit in for me if i'm planning on doing a couple more indoors but i'll leave that up to the coach to work his magic.

Back to the race and the plan for me was to go there and help Moses out more than anything. I haven't ran anything sustained at 8 minute pace yet since last summer so I was going to run round at 8:15 pace, sharing the lead with Lewis and then try to push on in the final kilometre. 

I took out the first KM and I got there a little faster than expected, 2:41. I didn't feel bad at all and I knew Lewis wouldn't come by so I just kept going while assessing how I felt along the way. If I felt tired I knew I could always back off and Jonny Taylor, who was tight on my shoulder. would come through and push on as you know that's what you'll get from him.

I was fairly happy on the front and when we reached 2km in 5:21 I knew we could both get a good time out of it. Jonny then came by and took up some of the running, but with him leading and passing lapped athletes we slowed over the next 600m. With 2 laps to go I decided to go for it as if I left it till 200m to go a athlete of Jonny's calibre would not make it easy over the final 200m regardless of how fast we were going.

I quickened up to a 30. and then again my last lap was a 30., this was enough to get a gap on Jonny and win the race in 8:01.

I was very happy with the outcome and it was a great opener for me as 2 years ago I opened with 8:08 and went on to run 8:00, so if I can take a few seconds off the 8:01 and get in the 7:50's i'll be happy.

Great work from Tom Gayle at Athleticos for giving up his time to go up and film all the events and get live updates on Twitter (http://twitter.com/athleticos_live ) as the day unfolded and for getting all the videos online the same day. Some races don't even get results online the same day never mind every race video!