Garry George Reps

So after a good night’s sleep following yesterday’s aborted tempo run I find myself up at the canal loitering at the back of the Rockets. As we walk towards the seemingly randomly starting point the group naturally splits into thee: elite, semi elite and rubbish. I guess I don’t need to tell you which group I’m with. Company today is in the form of Niall, Garry George and Steve. Although we all know Steve will run his own personally unique interval session – where recoveries are at the same speed as the rep.

Six servings of four minutes pain separated by ninety seconds intensive care are on today’s Menu du Jour and boy I feel hungry enough to eat un petit cheval.

It all starts off civil enough: three hard but fair reps out to the turn. Steve, however, just keeps running into the distance not to be seen again. The first one minute fifty seconds of rep four is tolerable and then we bump into Martin running towards us. About turn, three becomes four and it’s rumble in the jungle time. Now I’m not saying Niall and Martin are competitive but I think it’s fair to say neither like coming second. The pace shoots up and Garry George is jettisoned off the back.

Rep five and Garry George, now running with posttraumatic stress disorder, makes the classic schoolboy error of stopping a minute too early (yup been there – got the T-shirt). Rep six and with a minute to go I overtake Martin and run myself into the ground determined to stay ahead. A shallow gesture I admit given that Martin had been comfortably ahead of me on all the reps up to then. A few minutes later Garry George and his bag of excuses rolled up - hurrah!