This has been a really great running week so far. This morning I drove to Austin High at 6 because I had somewhere I needed to be at 8AM, so I did my warmup on the track and waited for the other gazelles to join me. It took ten minutes before the next car to show up - I thought I’d gone to the wrong place! Still, people started to trickle in and then the running horde showed up after their warmup from RunTex. Phew! Either the weather was nicer today, or I’m getting a lot more comfortable in the heat/humidity; either way I was pretty grateful.

After our drills, we formed up into our regular packs for some 1000M intervals - that’s two and a half laps around the track - with a scheduled three minute active recovery between each one. Jay asked if I wanted to get into Joseph’s faster group, but I decided to play it safe and stay where I was put… for now at least.

From the time that we were about 200M into the first lap, I moved up near the front just like I had on Tuesday. It felt really good, and our pace was very comfortable, I hardly felt like I was pushing at all. Maybe a 70% effort, at least that’s what it felt like. After that things got a bit more serious, but I was careful not to go too hard, and managed to resist any kind of surge on the last 100M, favoring consistency as much as possible. I probably picked things up on the last go ’round, but hopefully not by a huge amount.

I’m very happy with those times. They’re as fast or faster as my last set of 800M repeats three weeks ago, and I felt better doing them. I wanted to do five instead of four, but just plain ran out of time; rather than shorting my cooldown I asked Gilbert and he said that I needed the jog/stretch much more than another 1000M, since I only had ~5 minutes before I needed to head out. I was a touch disappointed because I hadn’t gone all out on that last one, thinking I’d be doing another, but that was probably a better way to do the workout anyway.

One interesting factoid - these are hitting right where they need to be according to the McMillan Chart for my 3:30 goal time in New York. Tuesday’s 2000M runs look pretty good against that guide as well. I can’t help but see this as a promising sign.

One more note: Patrick, who I ran with for most of the workout on Tuesday, ran quite a bit faster than the rest of the group; I’m sure he’ll be moved up next time. The rest of us are separating out into two different paces, which is interesting - and for maybe the first time since I joined the Gazelles, I’m near the front! I’ll be sorry to not do laps with some of the others but really look forward to improving my times. The amazing thing is that these are feeling easier as I’m getting faster! Who knew?

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