Meriden 1000's

After yesterday's exertions, I was a little concerned about the hilly 1000 m repeats on tap for this morning. The weather was nice, about 45 degrees, and the very short warmup jog from the Lake Austin RunTex up to the site of the repeats was uneventful, although I was slow to loosen up. Drills were fine in the dark, and then it was time to get going.

Gilbert ordered a max of 5 repeats (around .64 miles), but did not give us target times. It's been a long time since I did this workout, but the last time I did, I averaged 5:00 or so, so I figured I'd try to aim at that target. Amy and I took off for the first repeat, trailing after Frank's group of slightly faster people. I was struggling just a little bit on the first repeat, but by the end of it, I was feeling pretty good. It was slightly slow at 5:14, but not too bad. Getting into it, Amy and I knocked off the next 4 repeats in a very nice group of 5:04, 5:04, 5:00 and 4:58. I was really happy to stay so consistent and strong on this challenging course, and I felt strong on the uphills. After that, and a short rest, I knocked out 4 uphill striders for form and then 2 backwards uphill striders. Gilbert said that my form was pretty good on those, which is a change. I worked really hard this morning, but I'm happy with the results of the last hard workout this week until the 3M Half Marathon on Sunday.

Easy run back to RunTex with Jan and Henry, and we were all done. Total workout was 5.4 miles at 8:31 average pace.