Intervals At Zilker

Way too early, after last night's pace run, I met my running group at 6:00 am for a trip to Zilker Park and some 1000m intervals. It was nice and cool, about 51 degrees and clear skies. My legs were a bit stiff just 12 hours after the pace run, but that settled out during the 1.3 miles to Zilker. About 9:45 pace for the warmup. It was great to see my tribe again, and we laughed about the near chaos at the stretching session last Saturday without me there to do the leading. After drills, we gathered at the head of the Zilker course around the soccer fields for our 1000m intervals. Gilbert told us to go easier on the first interval, and to make the last one the fastest, striving for consistency in between. He did not assign exact times to shoot for, but suggested something around 10k pace, whatever that may be for me nowadays. Between repeats, we were to jog gently across the grass fields to the head of the course. The schedule called for 3-6 repeats, but this morning, he just said to do 6. Okey dokey.

I matched up with Amy and Joseph for our pace pod. Jan ran off a little faster on the first interval with a guy from her out-of-town office who was guesting with us, and stayed faster, so we just kept it a trio for our work this morning. We did a very good job on pacing. The first 5 repeats were done while we chatted a bit during the intervals, and those times were 4:35, 4:38, 4:39, 4:36, and 4:35. On the last one, Amy blasted out ahead, and Joseph and I knocked out number 6 at 4:21, nicely accelerated even though I thought we were about the same pace.

The return run was with a bunch of people, including Margaret, Frank, Kelly, Alex (who got to do 4 repeats, slightly slower than normal for him), Henry and me. My total run day was right at 8 miles, and the 6K of intervals were at an average mile pace of 7:21/mile, which was surprising to me.

I stayed and stretched afterwards, and then did 4x30 crunches/extensions and 2x12 pushups. It was a good day at the running office, but my legs are tired now after the last two days of workouts. Tomorrow's day off of running will be nice, even though I'll be in the gym.