1000 Meters, Sliced Up And Repeated

I was bad and skipped yesterday's casual recovery run. For that reason, I felt a little guilty as I joined the crew this morning for track work. We thought we were scheduled for 400m repeats, but when we got there, Gilbert announced that it would be the 3-4 x (600/400m) repeat workout. Same location, different stuff. Everyone was there this morning, at least in my pace group, and we enjoyed a nice comfortable warmup jog over to Austin High School's track. A Rogue training group was doing some sort of workout there, too, but it wasn't a problem at all. Drills drilled, we grouped up and were off. As always, Gilbert said to run the 600 and 400m pieces at "10K pace," with a 200m jog between the 600 and 400. Full 2:00 rest between each set. Instead of trying to figure out what pace to run, we just figured we'd get into it, and see where we were. That meant that virtually none of us were actually running 10K pace...unless we were running a dream goal 10K pace in the future somewhere. :-)

David Mitchell joined us today, so we had even extra guys, including Mark, who I had thought was in the beginner group. They both hung with us most of the day. As has been our pattern lately, it's been a relief to have lots of people willing to set the pace on the various speedwork laps. We did a good job of being consistent on the first set and second set. Gilbert stopped us then, and decided that we were having too much fun. He split off Brian, Shannon and someone else...who was it? Anyway, they went off, followed shortly thereafter by the rest of us. I think G just wanted to put pressure on some of the group (the front group), which would also cause us to run quicker because they weren't that much different than us. We generally ran the same sorts of times, I think. After we finished repeat number 3, I had to do one more, according to Gilbert, and the rest of the gang was nice enough to hang around with me for that last go-round. More good running later, we were finished. It was a really good workout, and much faster than I've ever done this one.

Splits (600/400): 2:41/1:46, 2:43/1:39, 2:32/1:40, 2:32/1:36. Those 400's, at least the last three of them, were just like our normal 400m repeat pace. Overall average mile pace was 6:54/mile for the 4000m of repeats. This was another really great workout for us, and although it was hard work, it wasn't crazy pace or anything like that. We all felt like we had something in reserve, so I'll say it was properly paced.

The run home was fun, as we were joined by Frank. We made plans as a pace group to meet on Saturday for a Mountain Bonnell loop, and hopefully some of them will join me for the journey over the top of Bonnell and back up to make a 15-16 mile day of it. Full stretching afterwards, and I was a happy runner. For the day, 6.7 miles. I've got to do the recovery run tomorrow...it's a bad habit to get into to skip workouts, even if they're "just" recovery runs. Every workout has a purpose after all.