Life In The Fast Lane

This morning, it was time to return fully to Gazelles training. My two week recovery period from Freescale is over, and this week I'm getting back to the fast stuff. Today was one of my favorite workouts, the Meriden 1000's. Gilbert was running late (turns out he was making sure people weren't leaving from the main RunTex), so we scooted out from the Lake Austin RunTex at a little after 6:00. The usual very short warmup run of .6 miles was uneventful, and we got most of the drills done by the time Gilbert arrived. It seemed that on every drill, more people were showing up, so by the time we were ready for the repeats, we had quite a crowd. There are a ton of new beginner class people, so it was pretty full today. It amused me that, now that the marathon has come and gone, we are back to doing the full length on each drill.

Gilbert warned us that we were still not quite over Freescale, so we got to do the first repeat as a warmup, and were to do 3 repeats, maybe 4. I ran most of the repeats with Brian, Amy, Colleen, Rachel and Emily. We actually chatted a little during the first repeat, then got more serious on the last two. It was a nice pickup over the three repeats, knocking big chunks of time out each time around. I was feeling pretty good, and enjoyed the workout as usual.

Splits: 5:19, 5:04, 4:47. Average 5:04, not too bad, about 7:30/mile pace. The last two were in the usual range, so I'm happy with the workout. Next time, we'll add another repeat or two. The intervals are about .66 miles.

After that, we finished things off with the uphill striders and backwards running uphill. The 5 x 150 meter uphill striders were all about form, but you still work pretty hard bounding up a hill. I'm usually pretty good with the backwards running bit, and the first backwards repeat was great. On the second one, there were a lot of slower folks who were either walking or moving very slowly, and I guess I got tangled up right at the top of the hill while looking around trying to see where the clear path was. I went down pretty hard, and hit my left hand and wrist as well as the, um, right hip. It was a "thud" situation. I took a little time to get my wits about me, and then it was time for the cooldown run.

I conned the crew into doing the longer cooldown run, up to Enfield, over to Exposition, and back to RunTex along Lake Austin Blvd. I ran up front with Frank, and we had a nice chat as we went along. It ended up being 2 miles that way, which we covered at around 9:00/mile pace. I think I'll make that my usual recovery run for Meriden in the future.

Anyway, for the day, just short of 6 miles. Except for the crash, I had a great time today. It's no fun to have muggy weather with temps more like early summer (about 68 degrees), but hey, we chose to live in Austin, didn't we?