Two trips out to Zilker in as many workouts? Its fun to get out into the park and run (on asphalt) because the rolling terrain gives you some good preparation for road races even if you can’t go as fast. Still, that’s why Thursday’s workout (400m intervals) is on the track, so that we can all get our lactic acid fixes in.

I felt much better on the way over to the park than I did last week, even though our warmup was quite a bit faster (around a 9:00 pace). It was cold when we started (well, I say cold, mid fifties most likely) but by the time we’d done our run over there and the regular drills I was more than hot enough. This time we did mile repeats (actually a little over a mile, maybe 15 seconds or so longer).

My pacing is still a little shaky, especially for shorter distances, so I ran with Jay for each of my four laps. We switched directions each time too, so laps one and three had a long uphill and a fast downhill, and two/four had a more annoying uphill with a long recovery. For some reason I was not doing a great job of hitting my watch buttons well, so these times are approximate:

Time: 7:40 - 7:30 - 7:40 - 7:20

Not too bad. This one was supposed to be at or above our goal 10K pace. Now, a 3:45 marathon translates into a 48:00 10K (better than my PR), which is about a 7:42 pace. Since these times were for a little over a mile, I’m pretty happy with them. I’m less happy with what happened while I was running - each time I went up the hills my breathing just went to hell and back, taking a minute or two to recover (and not quite completely recovering by the end of the lap). Something I know I need to work on, but its still frustrating, especially since the pace really didn’t feel that bad otherwise.

A nice slow run back to RunTex, and another eight miles out of the way before some people have even dragged themselves out of bed. Cool.

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