This morning, I joined the Thursday Gazelles for speedwork. It's kinda weird running with another Gazelles group, even though there were some familiar faces in the other (faster) pace pods. I didn't know who to group up with after drills and warmup (I ran over to AHS with Amy and got caught up a little on her summer), and so it was awkward waiting for Gilbert to sort us out. After he got the faster people going (and there's a lot of people in the faster groups on Tu/Th), he finally called for "Jay's group," which I thought was funny. Here I was, a guest runner, and he fell into that habit. Anyway, it was just Amy, a new guy, Mike, and me, in my group. I suggested that we aim for 3:30 per 800m, and Mike and Amy seemed okay with that. And, I figured I'd go for 7 or 8 x 800m today, depending on how I felt. I had done 6x800m a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to do one or two more repeats this session.
Off we went. I led the first one, then Amy, then me again, and we were nicely in range after three. I did the third repeat a little quickly, getting caught up in a faster group that went around us, so Mike led us through number four. It was mostly good, and we seemed to recover pretty well in the 2:00 rest intervals. Amy and Mike did the pace work on number five, in excellent fashion. Amy ran her own pace on number six, and I ended up pulling away from the first, running a pretty comfortable but much faster sixth repeat. Finally, on my own, I did a seventh repeat while most of the people were doing their 200m striders. Gilbert didn't know that's what I was doing, so he barked out a command to "run fast, high knees!" I was able to block that out after a while. :-) Anyway, that last repeat was faster still, so I finished up pretty happy.
The numbers: 3:33, 3:31, 3:23, 3:29, 3:26, 3:19, 3:13. Avg was 3:25, and that 3:13 last repeat was pretty close to a PB for this workout. I was glad to end up with an average pace within a second or two of my best for an 800m workout, and also was glad to increase up to 7 x 800m today.
Amy needed to get back, so we sort of ducked the 200m striders, and ran back to RunTex together. More chatting about Life, The Universe, and Everything (apologies to the late Douglas Adams), and we soon found our way back at RunTex. The cooldown running was fairly aggressively paced, possibly due to the conversational topics. Who knew?
For the day, 7.25 miles, so I'm having a pretty solid training week. I had a good chat with Pete and a few minutes with Alex, as well. Alex had a burning desire to get in his "essential exercises," so he couldn't stay as long as usual.
I shortchanged the stretching, which was bad, so hopefully I won't pay too much for that later.
We're doing the Shoal Creek up and back long run route on Saturday, and those of us running shorter will start with the Chicago people at 5:30am, despite the fact that we'll be done way earlier than they will (it's 20-22 miles for them, 13-14 for us). I'm already looking forward to a cold soak at Barton Springs afterwards, though!
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Just stopping by to say hi. Sounds like your training is going great!
So, is Dallas in your plans? That's an awesome course.
On the rare occasions that I actually stretch (hey, I'm barely exercising these days, so what do you expect?), I often catch myself attempting to count to 20 in German.
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