Karen writes: All's fair...

I sent Kate an email wishing her a good weekend, and telling her she should be eating plenty and taking it easy.    Having been only 13 minutes behind me in Perth (that’s less than 20 seconds per km), this puts her in striking distance of thrashing me come the next marathon.  Plus all that swimming commitment she is showing is cause for concern...of course...there is NO competition between us...none at all.

Her clever campaign actually started most obviously on the plane back to Auckland, with her generous (I thought) donation to her hungry colleague of her piece of chocolate cake.  My counter-campaign involves the jelly baby lollies from Jennies office, if I strategically position a few on the blotter on my desk and rustle a piece of stiff plastic Kate will come in and “help me out”, little does she know the cunning plotting behind that…those jelly baby’s are really meant only for her.  Actually that plan is a spectacular failure,  I am probably consuming twice as many as she is as I am still suffering from the marathon induced munchies (4 on the munchie acuity scale now instead of 10 though) however at least I am not giving up without a fight.

But it isn’t entirely non-serious.   After an event the exercise drops off to a proportionately tiny amount, and the unrestrained, absolutely indulgent consumption wants to continue well past the point you have replaced the  2000 odd extra calories burned off by the event.   It is so nice not to have to worry about energy balance while training heavily…except from the point of view of getting enough, it can become a habit.  Before I know it those hard lost kg will pile themselves back on and I shall be having to apply my running tights with a tyre lever and be back to slumping along in tent shaped mens singlets again.   Roll on being fully recovered and back to wasting enormous quantities of energy in the name of training!