Longer Fartlek intervals...

Back with the herd this morning, I made my way to RunTex for the 6:00am start for our little workout today. It was hotter than it's been, and humid as usual. Fun!

Anyway, I had a nice confab with Amy while we waited on the festivities to begin. There was a pretty large group there this morning, and a lot of newbies (at least they were new to me). Gilbert put me in nominal charge of the group going 5 miles, and we took off for our workout. We were to do 15 minutes of warmup easy running, then 8-12 sets of 2:00 fartlek intervals with 1:00 easy running between, finishing with a little easy running. Margaret and I led the group through the 14:33 of warmup running, and we managed to keep it to a nice 9:23/mile average pace for 1.55 miles.

A couple of the younger, faster members of our group took off then on the first 2:00 interval, and Richard went with them. I playfully warned him that they were faster than us, but he waved me off. Margaret and I, and later a new guy named Jim and I, led the gang through the interval portion of the workout. I think we did a pretty consistent job of it. We took a quick water stop at Mopac, and continued our efforts to the finish. Jim and I caught up with Richard as we finished the last fartlek interval, and he admitted that those guys he went out with were a little quick. You learn stuff every day, right?

We knocked out a total of 8 sets of fartlek intervals, and then finished it off with a little less than a half mile of easy running back to the finish line. The speedy part of the run was 2.87 miles, covered at an average pace of 7:56/mile, which was pretty solid, I'd guess. The last cooldown bit was .4 miles at 8:40/mile pace.

The total run was 4.83 miles at an average of 8:27/mile. It was a good one, and interesting to see how much different it was to do 2:00 fartlek intervals rather than 1:00 intervals as usual.

We finished it off with 5 x 100m striders, which felt just fine today. Then, Gilbert joined us with the faster folks who did 7 miles this morning, and we all did some of Gilbert's hops and then the balance drills. A good day. We gathered at RunTex with Gilbert for a quick stretching session afterwards.

It was nice to rejoin the herd after a week of vacation. Saturday will be a longer run, and I need to decide if I'm running more like 12 miles or more like 14. I guess I'll figure that out as we progress on Saturday. The fall marathoners are going 16, but I don't need to go that far. I also need to get back to the gym tomorrow.