As you may have guessed, I've been immersed in James Brown's music since his passing on Monday. What fun stuff! I had not previously gotten into a lot of his music outside of about 12 songs I had pulled into the iPod from the great "Star Time" 4-CD set that I purchased a long time ago. I've gotten out the discs this week, and I found I'd been missing some things. I love his count-in on "Hot Pants, Pt. 1" where he goes "One, Two, One, Two, Three, Unnnnnnhhh!" How cool is that?! Along with the Ramones' ubiquitous "One, Two, Three, Four!," those are the best lead-ins possible. Good God! Anyway, I digress...
Today, on another crisp and cold morning, we headed out at 5:45am from RunTex for 1200m repeats at AHS. It was about 38 degrees, perfect! Cold sweat, indeed! It was a fairly small crew, which is expected due to the holidays, but we still greatly outnumbered the Rogue training group, which Kenny reported counting only two people for their morning workout. Go Gazelles! It was good to see Rachel again after being off schedule with her for a week or two. We took the easy warmup seriously, and after drills, I felt good and ready to run. It was still quite dark, of course, but I can deal with that. It's harder to check your pace on the repeats, especially in a big pack, but I love the cold, so I was happy.
Our pace group was huge today. We had 10-12 people, but that turned out to be okay. Frank joined us for the first 3 repeats before taking time to check in with the magic running doctor who was there to check people out this morning. Gilbert told us to run the 1200's at the same pace as we ran the 1000's last week, continuing the trend (last week, we were supposed to run the 1000's at 800m pace). I estimated a target of 5:24 per 1200m (7:14/mile), which matched our target for the 1000's. We went faster on the 1000's than that, but it was an easy pace to calculate on the run, so I used that today at first.
The first repeat started out a little slow, so I picked it up on the third lap to bring us in just off our stated pace. After that, we settled into a faster groove, which felt fine to me. It's just a lot of fun to run when it's nice and cool. Most folks dropped out after 5 repeats, per Gilbert's instruction, but those of us who've been at this a while did the sixth repeat, the stated maximum for the day. Leslie and Jennifer joined me for that last repeat, and we scored our fastest repeat on the last, as planned.
Splits: 5:27, 5:18, 5:21, 5:19, 5:18, 5:15. Avg lap was 5:20, 7:09/mile pace. That's about right on target, so it was a fine day of running. I was especially impressed with Jennifer, who continues to come back strong after being hurt in the post-Freescale training last spring. She's tough!
We knocked out our 3 x 200m striders, and except for some instructions yelled at me across the track on the third strider, they were uneventful. I think Gilbert was yelling for more butt kicks, but it's hard to say. :-)
A nice relaxing cooldown run back to RunTex with Frank, Rachel and Jennifer, and we were done. I stretched a little bit, chatted with Alex, and it was time to go to the gym. For the day, 8.6 miles.
After that, I cruised up to Gold's for today's workout to keep the streak alive. I started out with some good stretching, and then launched into the workout. Today was core stuff again (I did floor exercises and the return of planks. Those planks were harder than they once were. I've got some remedial work to get them back where they should be, but I still managed two sets of all three planks at 45 seconds each. I'll take that.), and then upper body. The upper body stuff is still where the falloff is greatest in the case of a gym vacation, but it's coming back. I added back in the chest dumbbell exercises today, with flies, and they went better than I had expected. More work with the assisted pullup machine, too. I found a setting that allowed me to do 10 pullups, which at the end of the workout is pretty tough. But, it's a project, so I'll stick with it. I'll work on reducing the level of assist week by week.
So, another good workout day. Tomorrow is another nice and easy run with Frank.
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