1000's

It was a welcome nice morning today. Even the humidity was a little lower than usual, and the temps were around 71 or 72. For us, it felt like a crisp spring day. Elsewhere in the country, it might be considered oppressive. Perspective, huh?

Anyway, we rolled over to AHS for the track 1000m repeats. There was a pretty big crowd of various training entities there, so we did our drills in a narrow two lane span on the far side of the track. We didn't collide with any of the other groups, so we must have done okay. Gilbert told the Chicago people to do 8x1000m, and held us non-Chicago peeps to 5x1000m. I gathered a crowd of about 10 people, and we just took off on the first repeat while Gilbert was still getting the other groups organized. No sense waiting when we knew who our group was. Since I was only going 5 repeats, I figured I would help the Chicago people out by leading the way on pacing. It was still a bit dark on our first repeat, so I was a little slow on the first 400, and overcompensated on the last 600 to get us around at or under 4:30, our target interval. The next three intervals were right on the money, and were evenly paced, so I did my job pretty well. Brian helped out on the third interval. On the fifth interval, I told them I was done, and blasted away with Mark to "run how we feel." I guess I felt pretty quick, because I got a new PB on the last 1000m.

Splits: 4:26, 4:28, 4:30, 4:29, 4:09. Average lap 4:24.5, 7:05/mile pace. That's not a PB for average pace, but it was a nice set of speedwork. I was happy with how I did today, that's for sure. I know I could have done more at that 4:26-4:30 pace range, so that's also a good thing to take from today's efforts.

Mark, Rachel and I did our prescribed 3x200m striders on the track, and then we went to the fence to knock out our 100 situps. I managed 85, but they were in sets of 30, 20, 15, 10, 10.

The cooldown run with Rachel was quite relaxing, and it finished off a good day at the running office. Full stretching routine with Alex and Lisa, and I called it a day. It was another day of experimentation with the whole post-run food deal, too. Again, I had a yogurt while I was in the early stages of the stretching. We'll see how that works over time.

For the day, 7.2 miles. So far, so good this week.