Bouncing and Bounding Along

Today was a really fun circuit day. The weather was slightly cooler and I think less humid, which made for a much more pleasant start this morning. A pretty good sized group met for the long warmup to Austin High, and once we got there, Gilbert had us skip the drills and do another 5 laps on the track for further warmup. It was funny to see that we sped up when we did the 5 laps on the track. It was all supposed to be warmup, but there's something about running on the track... Alex ran with us as far as Austin High, but then he kept going for his nice and easy Monday run. We were at the very back of the pack, and it was nice to see that the warmup pace has turned back into an actual warmup again...at least for today.

At any rate, after that, and a cup of water, it was time for the plyometric playtime. Instead of the typical circuit routine, we all worked as a big group on Gilbert's collection of fundamental drills. I don't recall the exact order, but we did all sorts of bounding, hopping, high knees, jumping, stepping and such. One-legged hops, two-legged hops, "African Jumping Jacks," and all the different bits of the running motion broken down into bite-sized chunks to isolate the weak links. It was really pretty neat. We even did two rounds of running while holding our breath on the football field there. I made it 85 yards the first time and 75 yards coming back. That's such a claustrophobic drill, even though all you have to do is open your mouth to get air. After all the drilling, we went over and did the two-legged hops over low hurdles (5 hurdles, I think), followed by 10 pushups. We did 5 rounds of that mini-circuit. I didn't feel as awkward as I usually do when showing off my 2 inch vertical leap. :-) To finish off the day, we did a single 2 minutes of fast feet. I didn't know if I could do a full 2 minutes, but with the singing and chanting, the time flew by.

I can tell that my quads might be sore tomorrow, but other than that, I felt great after we got done. The long cooldown run was quite pleasant, and the crew was pretty happy today. It wasn't like after the 2000m repeats when we all were pretty beat.

I did the full stretching and chatted a little more, and the day was over, for running at least. For the day, 6.7 miles, so we didn't even get cheated on mileage with all the bouncy stuff today.