800's At Dawn

Hopefully this was the last really warm morning for a Gazelles workout, as the cold front is supposed to bring us delightful weather starting on Thursday. We'll see about that, but today we had business to attend to, and we gathered early for the warmup run to Austin High School. It was a smaller crowd since the Chicago people were meeting a little later for a session of gentle warmup and some strides. About 10 of us ran over to Austin High, interspersed with a zillion Rogue Training runners on the trail. I exaggerate, but you get the idea. I didn't know many of our people, since this is mostly the new Freescale people, but I'd get to know some of them by the end of the workout. By the time the drills were finished, we had around 20 people, maybe slightly more, including some of Gilbert's beginner class.

Drills drilled, we were ready to do our 800's. Shae and Bernard were there to get us started, since Gilbert was with the Chicago folks initially. We were to do between 2 and 6 repeats, with Richard and Marcy scheduled for 10 x 800, since NYC is still a while away for them. Since we didn't really know who was running what pace, we just all started at various times for the first 800. I knew my pace was supposed to be 3:30 on average, so I set out trying to find that pace, chasing Richard and Marcy just ahead of me. We had the inside lanes, and the Rogue people had the outside 4 lanes. I think they were doing a continuous run where they ran the straights hard and walked or jogged the turns, sort of track-based fartlek workout. At least that's my impression.

Gilbert showed up after I had finished two repeats, and during my 2:00 rest after that one, he had Sally join me, with instructions for her "not to pass Jay." She had blasted out her first two at something like 3:17 pace, and he thought that was way too fast if she was to do a decent number of repeats. So, for the next 3 repeats, she was a good pace partner, but you could tell she wanted to pick it up from time to time. For repeat number 6, she started with me, but almost immediately ran out of gas, so I finished by running that repeat by myself again. I amused myself by chasing down Jennifer and Bryan on my last lap, which was their first lap of number 5 or 6. It was nice to have someone to run with on those 3 middle repeats. I think next time, Sally will run with me from the start, and won't have a problem finishing the workout.

Splits: 3:33, 3:29, 3:32, 3:28, 3:27, 3:20. Somewhat consistent times, and a good last repeat.

I knocked out 3x200 strides on the track after I had grabbed a cup or two of Powerade, and then joined Jennifer and Bryan for the cooldown run back to RunTex. As is usual, we started out nice and easy, but picked it up gradually until we reached RunTex. Jennifer didn't realize she was pushing until I pointed it out to her. That's something else we'll work out with the new folks over the coming weeks. Also, Gilbert is slowly gathering the information on the new Gazelles so that we'll have pace groups soon for the various track workouts.

Once we got back to RunTex, I got the totally wet singlet off and changed into a dry shirt, and joined the Chicago people who had just finished their last pre-race workout for stretching. We joked and chatted while they got last-minute words from Coach, arranging a meeting time for the Saturday pre-race easy jog and stretching up in Chicago. Gilbert is going with them, which will be really great for the Gazelles. It was nice to see Jan, Patrick, Frank and Sean before they leave town on Friday. Actually, I think those four are all on the same flight, which will be pretty neat.

It was sort of nice out after the stretching, so I found myself in a long conversation with Jason and Richard afterwards. It seems that none of us were in a hurry to rejoin the "real world," so it was lots of running talk as we hung out.

It was a fun day of running once again. About 7 miles total, with 4800 meters of faster intervals in there at an average 6:59/mile pace. Slowly, I'm getting better and stronger. Tomorrow is an easy hour run, and Saturday is Mount Bonnel for 14 miles. Cool! Sunday is when I follow all my friends in Chicago, virtually, as they run their marathon. Should be exciting.