2000 Meters, Repeat as Needed [Entered 4/12/06]

Monday was a return to speedy work, 2-4 x 2000m on the Zilker street course. It's actually slightly over 2000m, but it's close enough for our purposes. It was a nice cool morning, about 60 degrees, and we had the usual fun chitchat on the way over to the top of the course. Drills in the dark, and we had to dodge another training group that was there running the "wrong" way around the Zilker loop as we warmed up. Lots of folks were tired this morning, judging from the reluctance to get moving on each individual drill. Long weekends, I guess.

Gilbert told us that 2 x 2000m was the minimum, and suggested 3 for most of us, although "four would be fine." We had most of our crew there, except for Jennifer, who is still fighting through a calf injury. I figured we'd run these "how we felt," and see how it went. The first one felt sort of quick, but not crazy fast. Turns out it was equal or better than my fastest effort ever on this particular workout. From there, it only got faster. We had a good mix of people taking turns pushing the pace, and it ended up being a great set of repeats. After the third one, no one could get energized to do a fourth, so we were done. Still, it was some excellent running. I checked back, and my average pace on these was 20 seconds faster per lap than my previous best. That's pretty cool. Average mile pace was under 7:00/mile, which was very exciting.

Splits: 8:47, 8:33, 8:35. Average 8:38/lap, or 6:55/mile pace. Strong running for us!

The cooldown run was fairly frisky as well, clicking in at 8:40/mile pace or so. All in all, it was a really good day at the running office. I stuck around afterwards for a good stretching session, and got to chat with Shannon and Rachel. A little over 7 miles total for the day.