This morning, I parked up at the Lake Austin RunTex along with the rest of the gang for one of the more interesting gazelle workouts. We chatted for a little and then headed up the hill to W 11th street on one of our shortest warmup runs. I did it at a 9:30 pace which, while its probably a little hard for an uphill warmup, was still fairly reasonable. I guess its good preparation for the workout, which was 3-5 hilly 1000M repeats. Well, a touch over 1000M but who’s counting.

The loop starts out with a 50M descent, then we turn left and pick it all back up again in two stages. A little recovery time during a slight uphill, and then you lose more height again on a very steep downhill that has a lot of people nervous. The lap ends uphill heading back to the starting line where Gilbert and crew are waiting - in this case with a video camera.

Now, I may be getting faster on the flat, but hills still have my number like … well, you can fill in your own analogy there. But ever since my time off last year I just haven’t had the power on the heights that I need. So. All that means is that workouts like this one are all the more important. I’ve done Wilke a few times recently, but the last time I ran this loop was about six months ago when I was running around 5:15-5:20 per lap.

This time I was a bit faster. Make that quite a bit faster. That’s one of the nice things about keeping a run journal like this, it puts things into perspective.

After the third lap, I was told that my form was getting sloppy enough to be noticed. I talked to Gilbert about it and ran my last lap slower, but really tried to focus on my form. On the way up the last hill I had Gilbert and Larry both looking at me, then Gilbert started to yell advice. I leaned forward, picked up my knees higher, managed to do a butt kick at the same time, and tried to keep my arms moving in a straight line. That made it easier, but I was still dead tired by the end of it.

After the official laps, I ran five strides up the first hill, then two backwards, and called it a day. I did take the time to review some of the footage of me running uphill, and you could really tell when I was getting tired. I think that’s actually part of the purpose of this workout, to tire you out in such a way that your form gets sloppy, so that it can be corrected when it needs to. The last take-away I got was to keep my arms moving back, in a slight circle, without pulling my shoulder blades together and tensing up. We’ll see how I do.

On the way back, I felt like I was running soooo slowly to make sure that I had a good cooldown run with a dropping heartrate. I was even passed by a group of gazelles who left after I did. Looking at the stats though, I was maintaining a 9:30 pace, which is about as fast as I’d ever want to do a cooldown. I think that’s something that we need to work on as a group!

Looking back on this workout, I was feeling much worse than my average heart rate shows. I think this means that I need to get into the gym more. Heck, even if it doesn’t directly mean that, I could sure use the strength training. Maybe this will get me back into a routine.

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