Gilbert Takes Pity On Us

This morning (it was nice enough, at about 70 degrees, but still pretty humid) a very small crew gathered at RunTex for the workout. The Boston people had left earlier to do 800m repeats at the track. I figured Gilbert would send us over for that workout as well. Instead, we stood with the beginner Gazelles and listened to Gilbert try to figure out what to do with us. He had wanted us to do a tempo race today, but we're still feeling the Cap 10K, and I think he could sense that. After shuffling the group several times ("If you ran Capitol 10K, go to the left" "Okay, if you want to do fartleks, move to the right" and so forth), my pace pals all ended up in the fartlek pile. He assigned us 7 x 2:00 quick/1:00 recovery, and we were off.

My hamstrings are still pretty tight after the circuit workout and Cap 10K, so it took a while to get loose. Sean and Alex joined us as guest runners, and the rest of the gang was Amy, Shannon, Emily, Rich and Brian. We did a slightly extended warmup portion, and then commenced the acceleration section. It was a pretty solid workout, with most of us taking a turn leading the pack. Coincidentally, we finished the last acceleration just before the Mopac water stop, so we took advantage of that to cool down a bit.

The cooldown run from there was a bit of an adventure, though. The trail is undergoing some repair between mile 1.5 and 1, so we took the detour across the fields at Zilker Park. That was pretty cool running on the grass. Finally, we returned to the regular trail for the last mile. We were observing good trail etiquette, running two abreast, and were passing a group of slower runners on the trail, when we came upon a lone runner coming the other way. He was running about 4 feet from his side of the trail, more or less centering himself (or, if you drew an imaginary line down the middle of the trail, I suppose he was on his side of that middle line). There was plenty of room, and we were in the middle of a pass. At any rate, he ran pretty much right towards me and stopped right in front of me with a look of exasperation on his face. I will guess that he intended to let us know that we were violating some sort of rule or were taking up too much of the trail. He was silent, though, so we flowed by him, and just shook our heads. We have all had moments on the trail in high traffic times where we had to slow dramatically to work our way past big packs of slower runners, and it's just one of those things. Or, if you're running alone, there's times where you have to move to the edge of the trail, but it's never a reason to try and pick a confrontation. I resolved to try and put it past me, but it's bugging me just a little bit even now. I hope he's not like that in his everyday life, too.

That ugliness aside, it was a good workout, and we finished it off with 6 x 100m striders. I added most of the stretching routine afterwards, and called it a day.

The warmup was at about 9:30/mile pace, 2.2 miles or so. The fast bits were about 2.6 miles at about 8:05/mile pace overall. We finished it off with 2.1 miles of cooldown running at something like 9:15/mile pace. For the day, 7 miles more or less. I didn't wear the GPS watch today, but it's no big deal.