Mile After Mile

Monday, it was time to get back to work with the Gazelles. A very small crew gathered (10 people, tops) for the warmup run from RunTex. Thankfully, most of them were my pace pals (Emily, Rich, Richard and Brian), so that worked out for us. Jennifer was there, but since she's on the Boston Plan, she had an alternate easier workout. They did 22.5 miles on Saturday, with some big hills in there, so they deserved an easy recovery day. Weather muggy but nice and cool, about 60 degrees. Good running weather.

The warmup was fun, and we eased over to Zilker Park at something like 10:00/mile pace. That was good, because I was feeling pretty tired this morning from lack of sleep. Having to wake up early yesterday cheated me out of my usual extra sleep on Sunday morning. Drills, and then it was time to get rolling. Gilbert told us to do 3-4 x mile repeats on the rolling Zilker course, "a little faster" since we were not doing 5. I led the first repeat for sort of a relaxed extended warmup, and was surprised when we saw the 7:28 split. It felt a lot closer to 8:00 pace while we were doing it. 2 minutes of rest, and it was off again, going the other direction on the loop course. Brian took over pacing about halfway through that one, and we chased him to the finish at a quick 7:01. The third repeat was another Brian-led affair, at 7:00. Richard had a couple of maladies on that one, first dropping his wedding ring (a bad side effect of slimming down with all that running), and then slipping and falling as he finished off the repeat. I hope he's okay. Anyway, I conned the rest of the tribe into doing that fourth repeat, and Brian and I led that one in 6:57.

A very consistent set of repeats after that first "comfortable" one, for a 7:06.5 average pace. That's a 5 second/mile improvement over the last time we did mile repeats, so that's very exciting to me. Maybe I'm due for a big PR at the Capitol 10,000?

The cooldown run was a little quicker than the warmup, at about 9:00/mile pace, but we still had fun. For the day, I clocked 7.7 miles, a good start to the week.

Today's post-run confab was with Rich, catching up with him since he and Christina had their son 10 days ago. Benjamin is doing fine, and his parents are doing the best they can with those early days of the new baby in the house. Sleep is a precious thing at that point. I followed that up with good stretching, and that was the running day.