Pace Run Through the Puddles

This morning, it was raining fairly hard up at the house. Still, I figured Amy and Shannon would be down at Town Lake, since they had e-mailed me about the pace run to confirm the starting time, so I packed my stuff up and trundled down to RunTex. I was thinking it would be a soggy run, but maybe we'd get some laughs out of it, even if we maybe didn't run it as a pace run. Who knows?

By the time I got down to RunTex, it wasn't raining at all. It was totally humid, and there were puddles on the trail, but it wasn't actually raining. That would be fine with me. I did some easy stretching while I waited in the empty parking lot, starting to think that the rain in other parts of the city would keep most folks at home. I also wasn't sure if Gilbert was back in town from Chicago, so I just waited to see who, if anyone, would show.

Finally, Alex pulled up, and shortly thereafter, Ivi, Shannon, Richard and Bryan joined us. So, at least we had some sort of group for the run. Gilbert rolled up just after that, and told us what to do, and sent us out on the trail. Alex went off with Ivi way ahead of us, and that left the four remaining folks as a pack at the start of the run. Gretchen pulled into the parking lot right when we were leaving, and she soon caught up with us on the easy 2 mile warmup portion of the festivities. Shannon was running with her dog, and as you might expect, the dog had the easiest day of any of us, loping along at easy dog pace all day long.

We crossed the I-35 bridge and turned onto the trail again, and it was time to start the pace portion of the run. Gretchen took off ahead, then I trailed her, and the rest of the troops were behind me somewhere when we started the faster running. Richard did a 20 miler on Saturday, so Gilbert told him to run relaxed, so he wasn't doing the fast stuff today. Oh, well. I just settled into a faster but sustainable pace and kept on rolling on the dark and damp trail. I couldn't see my watch, but that was probably a good thing, since I could concentrate on just running instead of obsessing over the numbers. There weren't many people out this morning, so there weren't even that many folks to try to catch. Except for a shoe soaking at the boat ramp near Austin High School, it was just running as I crossed back over Mopac footbridge for the homestretch of the run.

I kept the pace up, and counted down the quarter mile markers all the way down to Zero, and I was done. Turns out, I did some pretty solid running today.

Splits: 10:07, 9:16 (warmup 2 miles), then 7:41, 7:38, 7:38, 7:45, 7:46 for the pace stuff. Fast portion was 5 miles at 7:42 average pace, pretty good running.

After we all had finished, we did 6x100m strides, and then most of us stayed at RunTex later and did the full stretching routine. It was the first pace run for Bryan, so he had the usual issues with trying to figure out what the pace was supposed to be during the faster bit (somewhere between 10K and marathon race pace, your "hour run" pace). The rest of us offered what guidance we had picked up doing pace runs for a while now. We had fun talking while we stretched, and Gilbert showed up halfway through and tortured me a little on the hamstring stretches, too. It was a good finish to a pretty good running day.

Alex has this week off, so my only worry is that he'll go to the gym every day and attend all the Gazelles workouts all four weekdays. I'm not REALLY worried about that, but it's fun to tease him. Gilbert was pleased with the Chicago marathoners, by the way, but it seems he really wasn't comfortable with the size of the race. All those runners were just a little too much for Coach, but he had a good time helping the Gazelles along the course. Seems that he ran most of the folks in for at least a quarter mile or so, and that can be a big help late in a big marathon effort.

The rest of Columbus Day will be supervising homework and Science Fair research with the kids. Yee Haw. With any luck, they'll get enough work done that we can go and catch a movie. That would be more fun than all-day homework, for sure!