Rollercoaster (Say What?)

Today was a fun workout, the fartlek tuneup run that happens midweek before a big race. It was nice weather for it, too, clear and cold in the high 30's. Gilbert told us to do the 1:00 accelerations at something like half marathon pace, not the really hard intervals that we've sometimes done. 20 minutes warmup, 15 x 1:00 accelerations with 1:00 recovery jogging between, and finish it off with cooldown from wherever we find ourselves. Off we went.

We had 8 of us in our group today. Frank joined us as a guest runner, as most of his peeps were absent today. With Frank, we also had Carrie and Amy (the "other Amy"), Emily, Jennifer, Brian, Rich and me. It was cool to have so many for this run, so we would only have to lead two intervals at most. The 20 minutes of warmup running were about 9:45/mile pace, nice and easy. I tried to rid myself of the Abba tune, "Waterloo," that was stuck in my head from about the half mile mark of the day, by telling it to everyone. It helped a little. Carrie and Amy said that they got stuck on "Take A Chance On Me" instead.

Once we hit the trail again after the I-35 bridge, it was time to start up the accelerations. I took the first one, then Frank, and so forth. The first time through the rotation, we generally ran quicker on the intervals as usual, but comfortably so. The second time through, I think we picked it up just a tad. Nonetheless, we stayed together all the way around, and had a good run. The cooldown run was about a mile and a half, about 9:30/mile pace. There was more discussion of pure pop music as we did the cooldown, and they gave me some great ideas of songs to throw at the long run group in a couple of weeks. I really enjoyed this one. Something about staying in a tight group like that, with everyone taking assigned turns leading the way, makes for a fun time.

We finished things off with 5 striders and then Gilbert led us in balance drills and some of his hopping stuff. It was silly as usual, at least if you were watching. I stayed around to stretch with Aaron and a couple of other folks, and then it was time to go.

For the day, 7.25 miles of running. The fartlek section of the run was 3.4 miles at 8:27/mile, including the recovery jogging, so that was just fine. On average, I'd guess our accelerations were done at 7:30-8:00/mile, depending on who was leading.

From here on out, it's truly easy running until the 3M half marathon on Sunday. Gilbert told us his idea of pace for 3M, and it sounds incredibly fast to me, especially when you balance his other warning not to "race" 3M too hard. If I run what he suggests, it would be a huge PR effort. The course is certainly fast, and the weather looks to be good, but I'm not sure if I'm going to try to run quite that hard with only 3 weeks to go till Freescale. We'll see.