About ten of us met up this morning to sign up for Gilbert’s fall marathon training program. For an hour we listened to his advice, and learned a little about the program; in a nutshell, this is what’s going to get me down to a 3:30 marathon by November 6th. That goal’s still a little scary, by the way, but less so the less I think about it - which we were encouraged to do. Even our “pace” runs will be hard how-we-feel runs at first, since we’re still finding our legs.

After about an hour, most of us headed out to do a loop around the lake while some folk geared up for the News 8 8K race. Gilbert had barely lost last time around, due to some serious marathon training going on, and was looking forward to a rematch - unfortunately the winner from 2004 was in Dallas this weekend, and Gilbert won it easily making a couple of comments about a lack of competition; I think he was a bit disappointed.

Anyway, while they were off warming up, we headed out West to do our lap. I ended up running with Jason, who’s shooting for somewhere between a 3:20 and a BQ this fall in Chicago, and we chatted aimiably about this and that. He said that he was only going to do seven miles, and I ended up running back with him - I probably shouldn’t have, but I was fairly tired this morning and really wanted to see the early racers come past RunTex before our stretching session.

We finished in plenty of time, indeed despite our sweaty appearance we’d kept do around a 9:30 pace for the whole run - yes, it was that humid once again - so we waited about five minutes and then did eight sets of strides out at Auditorium Shores. Following that, we went back to RunTex and became part of an interesting backdrop for some News 8 coverage, where Rick Perry (the governor) and one of the other local coaches were giving interviews before Gilbert came down the street.

It was pretty inspiring to see him pass by when he made it down to us at about the 4 mile marker. He really didn’t look like he was running quickly, everything was so efficient; if it wasn’t for the fact that nobody was within 30 seconds of him (and the 2nd place guy looked like he was trying a whole lot harder) you’d never know how fast he was going. Very impressive. I think that’s the first time I’ve seen him in a race since I started training with him, I just wish I could have seen him really pushing!

Anyway, that was that; we finished up with Jay leading our stretches, and we had the pleasure of doing them in a great location overlooking the race and so could cheer on our friends and teammates. Gilbert put in an appearace about half an hour later to encourage us to keep our backs straight, and to push us into some push ups, then had to head back out to the award ceremony. All in a day’s work, I guess!

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