10K, Split 5 Ways

Oh, my! I woke up today with more or less the same generalized quad soreness and stiffness that I've carried since 3M. I had to do the same internal dialogue (see yesterday's entry) in order to convince myself that going on down to RunTex to run with my friends was a sane idea. :-) The good running angel advisor won the internal argument, and so I found myself standing around with everyone at 5:45am, despite my perceived condition. It seems that I wasn't the only one still suffering the after-effects of the 3M race, which helped a little. Weather was nice and cool, around 40 degrees.

Gilbert sent us off with the information that AT&T people were to do 5 x 2000m, and the Boston people (and half marathon peeps) "only" needed to do 4 x 2000m. Man, that was going to be a party, huh? I was strug-gul-ling [sic] with the running once we got moving, that's for sure! I was doing all I could just to locomote in the general direction of all the other troopers, and Jennifer picked up on my severely altered gait immediately. It took pretty much a full mile for my legs to start loosening up enough for some quasi-normal running form. Not too much fun, that's for sure. We drilled away, and those were only occasionally agonizing, and finally it was time to group up for the speedy fun.

Kenny was there to say that the first loop of Zilker was to be a little easier, and then he said something about these 2000's being at marathon goal pace. That conflicted a little with Gilbert's statement that we were shooting to show a time improvement from the last time we did 2000's at Zilker. So, our group sort of fell in the middle, aiming to run a good set of repeats without worrying about how close we got to our workout best for 2000's. That workout best was 7:00/mile pace, or 8:24/lap. Judging from how my legs were doing, I didn't expect to get too close to that, especially if we were doing 5 of them. So, how did it go?

We had a nice group to start with, and I hung out in the back of the pack for almost all of that first repeat. I was still finding my way into comfortable running form, and I just wasn't feeling it today. I moved up a bit on the little hill, and ended up pretty close to the front by the end of the lap. That one was really slow, by comparison to how we've done these in the past. It was plenty fast if we were aiming at the MGP standard, though. Go figure.

Anyway, from there, the group sort of split into subgroups, and the lead pack got smaller and smaller, until the last (fifth) repeat, when it was just Marty, Brian and me cruising around that last lap. I felt fine, cardiovascularly, but my legs were just pretty tired, and I didn't have a lot of snap in them. Still, Brian and I pushed and pulled each other through the end of repeat number five, and ended up with a set of 5 x 2000m that was consistently faster each lap. I could get behind that sort of numbers.

The splits: 9:19, 8:55, 8:51, 8:40, and 8:36. Average lap was 8:52, or 7:24/mile. That's way off what we did back a while ago, but considering how I felt going into this workout, I can handle this.

We had a nice comfortable cooldown run, and then I did some decent stretching, because Lord knows, the legs needed it!

I'm still pretty darned tired, but now for the rest of the week, I can relax a bit, and just aim for the 15 miler on Saturday (in Lufkin, solo, unfortunately). For the day, 9.4 miles, a pretty long day at the running office, but this was really the last tough workout before AT&T, I think. We might have something longish and snappy on Monday, but from there it's easy street as we sharpen the spear for the marathon.

And the countdown clock goes tick, tick, tick...