Return to the Track

I guess I actually hurt my left wrist more than I first thought on Monday. Yesterday, it was pretty painful to grip anything with the left hand, so I didn't go to the gym as planned. I know, I could have still done core stuff and the leg weights, but hey... :-) It's a little better today.

Gilbert and his wife had their second child last night at 8:00pm, so he sent Bernard as a substitute coach. Mother and child are both doing well, and the family is very happy.

Anyway, I met up with the gang at RunTex on this muggy 68 degree morning for our visit to Austin High School's track. It was a fairly small crew, it seems, but we headed out on time and cruised the trail over to AHS. I was talking with Richard, and passed the turn for the Pfluger bridge by accident. I figured it out soon enough, and we made our way over to the track without further incident. The rest of our pace group followed me willingly, by the way, wrong turns and all. That was funny.

There was a large group of beginner Gazelles there at the track, as well as Rogue training, so it was fairly busy there. Drills drilled, we were ready to roll. I thought the workout as posted on the website was to do a 600m interval at 10K pace, jog 200m, then run a 400m interval at 10K pace, followed by 1:00 rest. Then, repeat that set 3-5 times. Richard and I did some calculations on the way over, and came up with 1:52 for 400m and 2:48 for the 600's, based on a projected 47:00 10K. So, that became our targets for the workout.

The group was Emily, Amy, Richard, Brian, Jennifer, Colleen, Rachel and me. We did a pretty good job on pacing, and the workout actually felt pretty comfortable. We finished 3 sets, and I managed to convince the tribe to do one more with me. We did them at an average pace 10 seconds per mile faster than last year at this time, which is a good thing. We even talked during some of the intervals.

Splits: (600/400) - 2:46/1:54, 2:50/1:56, 2:47/1:51, 2:45/1:43. Overall pace was 7:27/mile for 4000m of intervals. It turns out that we were supposed to do a longer ladder, going 600/400/200 meters at pace on each set. Oh, well. I think we got plenty out of the work that we did.

Cooldown run was fun as usual, and then I stuck around to do most of the full stretching routine. It's sure different now that the cool weather seems to have ended around here, but I had a good morning nonetheless. For the day, 6.7 miles. Tomorrow, it's time to stretch out the recovery run to 45 minutes or so...