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| Post session camaraderie |
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| The last hill is a killer |
26 September
Day 167
The alarm was set for 5.15am to join the gang, the self-styled We are Gazelles. It started as a hill running, bootcamp sort of affair under the auspices of hardman Rob Blair, who now runs The Commando Temple down the road. We used to pay to be broken on his particular wheel, now we push ourselves. Matty, the fastest and fittest suggests the session, which usually involves sprints and hill reps. Today we ran from bench to bin and back again, all the way up the central carriageway of Greenwich Park, then up and down the steps leading to the summit of One Tree Hill, then circuits of a trail loop. It's an hour's worth of running intervals, plenty of steep stuff. You warm up as the sun rises, but today was the first morning since winter that we started in darkness.
Training this early, you feel you're shrugging off gloom and torpor. You turn off your alarm and have an inward argument with the devil on your shoulder, pleading fatigue and anxiety as excuses to pull the covers over your face. As you punch the devil off you put on running shorts with conviction, drink water, take vitamins, feed cats, brush teeth. Jogging through the park and chatting with fellow nutters you begin to feel smug, sweating and striding while the world sleeps. The first few hill reps make the blood sing, you banter happily and try to outpace each other on the bends. By the end, nauseated and sweating, your legs all jelly, but you're in a happy place. Who cares about work, domestic duties, unpaid bills. You're a gazelle, feeling groovy.
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