Many times I’ve gazed along the open road

June 21st brought the first official day of Summer and with it my first official day of Marathon training.  Now that I’ve had 5 weeks of decent training it is time to step up the workouts and the mileage.  My aim will be the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon on September 26th, 14 weeks away.

On Saturday night I acted as a rabbit in London for a 5000m on the track.  My plan was to run 65.5 secs/lap for 3000m.  I got to 2000m on pace in 5:27, not particularly even but not bad.  In the next half of a lap Destroyer pressed the pace and took over the lead.  I wasn’t ready to run any faster so I jogged for 800m (about 2:30) to let the next pack catch up and ran the last 2km with Matt Brunsting.  I figured I might as well get nationals standard (14:25) out of the way just in case I want to race the 5000m.  With 20 meters remaining I looked at the clock and thought I was well in the clear and jogged in only to see 14:25 roll up before I hit the line.  Since I wasn’t too concerned about the standard I could laugh at my mistake.  My focus for Nationals was always the 10 000m as I will be in marathon mode.

Next up will be Tim Horton’s Peachbud 10km on Tuesday June 29th in Grimsby.  This will be my first hard race in a long time.  I think with my recent training I’m finally able to put together something solid.  We shall see.

I decided I’m going to cheer for the Netherlands at the World Cup (Spain and Argentina were the other considerations).  My last name is Flemish,  not too far off from Dutch.  I was not impressed by England’s effort last game.  The US already dominate enough sports on this planet.  Germany disappointed me against Serbia and I would really like to see Ghana get to the next round (at least one African team needs to make it). Brazil will have enough fans as it is.