Wow. Today was my first day training with Gilbert’s Gazelles and let me tell you, those guys are pretty hardcore. This is going to be fun!

We met up at RunTex (Riverside) and I did some stretching, turned over my paperwork, and tried not to get too cold. Come six o’clock, most everyone was there and we did a “warm up” run to the Austin High School track. This trip is a little over 1.6 miles - a pretty decent warmup - and we did it in 13:50 for an 8:30 average pace.

Once we got to the track, we did drills for about twelve minutes. These included skipping, running backwards/sideways, high knees, back kicks, pretty much whatever you can think of as a standard running drill, as sets of 200m. I realized during second 100m of the high knees that I wasn’t getting my legs up where I needed to. Guess I’ve got some muscle imbalances to work on.

After that, we did two “circuit” laps. We did a “quick but easy” 400m - I did a 7:00 pace - then some bench steps, push ups, sit ups, high jumps, and lunges. Then straight into another lap (this time I only did an 8:00 pace), and repeated the exercises. After that, a did a quick check and my HR was up at 172! Normally they do more of these, but Gilbert had other things in mind. We did some high-kick jumping jacks, where you bring your leg (straight leg) out in front and clap underneath it, alternating legs, then headed over to a workout area.

The next 20 minutes were spent in constant motion. In fact, at no point during this workout did I ever really completely get my breath back, or let my heart rate drop down below about 135 (guessing). We did everything from work on running form exercises to doing the traditional football “fast feet” running, with an emphasis on building quads. Then back over to the track for the final exercise, which was to do two 100m sprints and to try to hold our breath the whole way! I got to about 75m the first time, maybe 60m the second time, before breathing. If you haven’t tried it before, then take my word for it: its difficult.

That was it. All that was left was the nice easy 1.6 mile run back to the parking lot to get my car. This time, I did it in 15:37 for a 9:40 cooldown pace. My Forerunner says that we did about five miles. That’s not bad for a Tuesday run anyway, and it doesn’t count the fact that most of what we did involved jumping in some manner. Something tells me I’m going to get thinner and faster pretty easily, as long as I give each one of these days everything I have. And that sounds pretty good to me.

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