Good Golly Miss Molly! 20 x 400m Repeats!

Sometimes, I am bemused at the mystical powers that Gilbert seems to wield over us. You show up for the workout, you know what it's going to be ahead of time, and you have a vague idea of what pace you might run. Then, you get there, and Gilbert looks at you and says you should do the maximum number of repeats at a pace that seemed outrageous in the comfort of your own home. You grumble a little, mutter that it seems impossible, and then you do the workout just like he said to do it, and you find you're stronger than you thought. This morning was such a day as that.

It was beautiful this morning, again, temps in the mid 50's, clear, crisp. Amazing weather for mid-April in Austin. A huge crowd of peeps left from RunTex at 6:00 for the warmup, with a bunch of folks meeting us at the Austin High track to save time after the workout. I ran over with Amy, chatting away to catch up on what's going on with her. Even the warmup today was faster than normal, but it was still comfortably paced (9:27/mile). The sheer numbers of Gazelles doing the drills was unbelieveable. There could have been 40 people there. At any rate, after the drills, we gathered in our loose pace groups for the Word. We were to do sets of 5x400m repeats, with 1:00 active walk/jog rest between. He said at least 2 sets, and up to 4 sets. The first set were all to be at 10k pace (most of us laughed at that), then each successive set would be 2 seconds per 400m faster. Between each set of 5, we got to walk a full lap of the track (or rest for 4:00 instead). The watchword was consistency in each group of 5.

My crew was Richard, Jan, Amy, Shannon, Margaret, Joseph and me. Was there someone else with us? We arbitrarily set our goal pace for the first set at 1:48/400m, or 7:14 mile pace. We did a great job keeping the first set on track: 1:48, 1:49, 1:48, 1:46, 1:49. The next set was a little more erratic, but still pretty solid: 1:48, 1:45, 1:47, 1:45, 1:44. We kept getting distracted by the slightly faster group ahead of us (Frank and Alex's group), and some in our group would get pulled along on the homestretch. Still, we were pretty solid through 10 repeats. Richard, Joseph and Margaret had early meetings and had to leave after 10. Set 3 was faster still, and we clicked them off at 1:44, 1:41, 1:44, 1:44, 1:45. Nice consistent job there. Like booster rockets, Shannon and Amy left after 15 repeats, off to work. So, for the last set, I was the last of the Mohicans. I hooked up with Frank, Alex and Marci, the only people left on the track, and settled in for a last fast 5. While we were doing those last 5, I noticed that Jan was doing a couple more repeats by herself. Oh, well. My last 5 were surprisingly good: 1:40, 1:41, 1:39, 1:39, 1:31. On that last one, I was feeling pretty clunky, but I blasted out an all-time 400m repeat single lap record for me. That last one was 6:06/mile pace, which just sounds outrageous to me.

Anyway, Gilbert was happy that we had done the whole workout, and we watched ourselves on video afterwards. Gilbert told me that my form looked pretty good, which made me feel much better about myself.

Everyone was driving from the track except for Alex and me, so I did the cooldown run with him back to RunTex. A couple of times, we had to make each other back off on the pace, and we still did something like 8:55/mile pace back after the workout. Crazy, we are. It was fun to talk with Alex, and it's good to see him so happy again now that he's training like normal. He is still a little grumpy that his times aren't what they were when he was blasting away in the fall and winter, but he's going to be back to his normal running self in no time. He's plenty fast to me, that's for sure!

Alex and I did the full stretching ritual once we got back to RunTex, as well as the post-run exercise stuff. I did 4x30 crunches/leg extensions, 2x20 "Jan" crunches, 2x20 Patrick's "Canoe" crunches, and 2x15 pushups. Then, Alex did 10 pullups, and, inspired, I tried it, and was at least able to do one pullup. That's an improvement, believe it or not! :)

It was a fabulous day at the running office. Total mileage was 8.7 miles, at an average pace of 8:00/mile, including warmup/cooldown. Average pace on 8000m of repeats was 6:58/mile. I don't know exactly what this all means with regard to the 5K race next weekend, but I think I'm supposed to run harder than I had originally planned. I'll just let Gilbert tell me what to do.