Today was a lot of fun. It seemed relatively easy since its sandwiched between two hill workouts as well (I’ve heard that next Tuesday’s is the hardest workout by far).

We ran out to Zilker park, near the soccer fields, at an 8:50 pace. Did the usual drills, and then found out why we were there. I was thinking that we might be doing cross-country or something, but we only ran on the asphalt park road. There were a few light ups and downs, but nothing significant. He had marked out a 700m course for us, with about a 300m slow jog return over the grass, and we had to do repeats:

Time: 2:59 - 3:15 - 3:09 - 3:10 - 3:10 - 3:01
Pace: 6:52 - 7:28 - 7:15 - 7:17 - 7:17 - 6:56

That was fun. It was certainly more interesting than doing 800s on the track, and it forced me to pay a lot more attention to my body to guage my pace rather than just looking at track markings. The first lap was too fast, as usual, and I paid for it on lap two, but I think that if we had had more time I could have done another two or three around the 7:15 pace. I’ll try to hit that speed the next time we do 800s, I think. The last lap was definately pushing things - I love it, but I couldn’t have done another one right afterwards.

This time, I really tried to work on my form. I noticed that it would tend to slip unless I was focusing on it, so I’m sure I could have done a whole lot better. Leaning forwards is difficult for me; at least, its difficult to do correctly with the whole body, not just bending at the waist. When I get it right, I feel myself moving faster and easier. Just a matter of practice, I guess.

Running back to stretch started out nice and easy, then we picked up the pace. We ended up with an 8:30 pace for the whole distance, so we might have been sub-8 by the end. I was just using my HRM watch rather than my ForeRunner since I couldn’t find it this morning (turns out that I had it with me, just buried in my laptop case).

Total distance: ~7 miles

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