Mile Repeats and a Missed Workout

Monday, I had a variety of issues that conspired to prevent me doing the scheduled pace run. There's something about Mondays, I guess. At least I feel bad about it.

Today, I met the Gazelles early on a beautiful cool morning (52 degrees, clear), and we cruised over to Zilker for the hilly mile repeat course. In one direction, there's a long sneaky uphill followed by a steep downhill and then steep uphill right before the finish. In the other direction, we have that downhill first, then a shorter steeper uphill, and a long downhill finish, although slight downhill. I've always gone faster on the second direction, even with the steeper hill in it.

Anyway, drills in the dark, and then we gathered for the repeats. Gilbert initially told me to do 6 repeats, and I tried to pace myself accordingly. My pace pod was Richard, Jan, Joseph, and Gretchen and Liliana started with us but ran faster. My pacing was about like I usually do, with a 10 second difference between the clockwise and counterclockwise direction. I had thought I'd run a little easier than I did, and I felt like these miles were totally within me, but I was still a little quick. Mile splits were 7:43, 7:32, 7:38, 7:28, 7:18. Jan and Joseph stayed around to do number 5 with me, which was nice. It's always easier to do track work with people around you. I thought I had one more to do, and was not going all out on number 5, but Gilbert told me 5 was enough. Better to leave the track thinking you could do more, he says. Okay. I felt pretty comfortable through the workout, although it got slightly tougher during the steeper bits.

Nice run back to RunTex with Frank and Joseph. Then, I did some moderate stretching with Alex, Jan and Patrick. After that, Patrick, Jan and I did the expanded battery of ab/core exercises. I did 4x30 crunches/leg extensions, 2x25 of the new "Jan" crunches, and 2x20 of the "Canoe" crunches that Patrick showed me, where you go side to side. That's a lot of ab work! I also did 2x15 pushups. It was a really great day at the running office. Total mileage around 8.8 miles, 8:20 average pace. Mile repeats were at an average pace of 7:32.