Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Fartleks...no, wait...Recovery Run...no, uh...Circuit Training!

There was quite a bit of confusion about this morning's Gazelles get-together. First, Gilbert and Bernard were out of town. Second, I guess Pete, the usual stand-in, was out of town as well. So, Kenny was nice enough to get up early and help our little crew out this morning. Now, on the website, there were two different workouts listed. Originally, the workout was supposed to be fartleks, always fun, with 10 x 3:00 accelerations with 1:00 recovery. That would have been fine, but it was not to be the workout. David told us that Gilbert said on Saturday that if we raced on Tuesday, the workout was a 5 mile recovery run. Okay. And, a second workout on the website (and third possibility) was circuit training at Austin High.

With all that, we also had a very tiny group today. Most of the relay racers were taking a day off, and a lot of people presumably had vacations this week. There might have been a dozen runners. Richard was there along with Colleen and Anne, along with some brand new Gazelles (I think they were, anyway), and a smattering of the usual crew. Once Kenny got there, he announced that the workout was circuit training. All right, I suppose. I could get behind that the day after a little 5k workout. Richard and I were sort of looking forward to fartleks, but we went with the announcement. As we cruised over to AHS, using the short route, I noticed that David and some of his peeps did the recovery option anyway. Good for them.

We got to AHS after a very reasonable warmup, and I was feeling great. No aches or pains, so again, I guess I didn't run hard enough yesterday. :-) Drills drilled, Kenny gave us the workout. We were to do 3-5 circuits, with 400m runs between. I couldn't get around to asking if the more veteran members should do 800's between, so instead, I just went with it again. I did the first couple of 400's with Richard, and then we got off synch for the last two. No worries. The exercises are pretty easy nowadays, and even the lunges weren't too bad today. I had okay pacing on the 400's, somewhere between slow and moderately paced. The 400's were 1:51, 1:58, 1:50, 1:52. Adequate for the workout.

After 4 circuits, we grouped up for 2 x 30 seconds of fast feet. Kenny didn't get the memo that had the beginners stop at 30 seconds and have the rest continue to a minute, but again, it wasn't worth fussing about. I was really drenched upon completion of everything, even though it was overcast and not too hot. That's what mega-humidity will do, I guess.

Richard suggested the long cooldown run, and Colleen and I thought that would be just fine. We had fun chatting on the way back. Now, after we were done (2.73 miles on the return trip), I tried to read my workout history to get an idea of what our pace was coming back. I think my eyesight is failing me a bit, because I thought it reported that we ran at sub 8:00 pace on the cooldown. I got excited at the time, but the more I thought about it, and the fact that we were talking the whole way, I knew something was wrong. It certainly wasn't the watch's fault. :-) I was reading the time of day for each lap (7:12 am, 7:21 am, etc.) as a pace. Oops. It was more like 9:21, 9:01, and .73 at 8:48/mile. That's quite a bit different, right?

Any way you slice it, it was a fun little workout, albeit somewhat easy-going. Ended up with 6.2 miles for the day with all the different bits. Tomorrow, I'll get out there for the recovery 7 miler with the usual crowd, and Saturday will be my last Gazelles workout for a week or so, so I'll try and have fun with something in the 12-13 mile range.

No comments: