PCRG

It's after midnight and I'm sitting at work waiting for a report to be finished. How sad. I woke up at 5:10am this morning to do the Pat Carroll Running Group (PCRG) session. Pat himself was a freak runner (2:09 marathon) and now sells his services as a running coach on Tuesday/Thursday/Friday mornings around Brisbane. The first session is free so I thought I'd check it out.

Pretty massive turnout - there must have been 50 people of all different shapes, sizes and running speeds. From the QLD Premier (not kidding) to ironman triathletes, they were all there! I arrived late and tagged onto the two fittest looking guys. After a seriously long, seriously slow warmup, we got to the Botanic Gardens for the session. Basically, for 20 minutes Pat pointed to a hill and we sprinted up it, and jogged back down! Every now and then, he'd change the hill. It felt like there was a lot of variety, even though we were running up a lot of the same paths for most of the time. Each sprint was between 100m and 400m, on both paths and grass, with nothing too steep.

There were 2 guys who were pretty quick, and one tiny girl who was threatening to put us all to shame! I stuck in the second group for the first 10mins, then moved up to run with the leader. i ran with him for most of the next 8mins, until the last 2 efforts, in which I overtook and held my lead. Happy with that.

It was nice to be running with people again, and to be doing some speed work. I think the session was too short, with way too much warmup/warmdown (if you include my run to/from home, I reckon I did about 8-10km of easy jogging!!). I'll probably go back again next week.

Cracking morning and day in Brissy again. Not sure if I'll be able to wake up tomorrow for the gym.