Today was a little bit different from a normal Gazelle workout. We met down at RunTex and then headed out for five miles on the trail without our normal separate warmup and drills. Gilbert had told us to do a solid 15 minute warmup, and Jay (who got back from DC just in time) was instrumental in making sure that we actually did just that.

The warmup took us East from RunTex to Congress, over the bridge, and back around to the bottom of the Pfluger footbridge (aka Lamar). That’s when we got to start pouring on the speed, with a series of 2 minutes on, 1 minute off fartleks - theoretically to be done at our interval, or 10K, pace. Because of the short time and the changing terrain mine were fairly random, but all pretty hard. I’d moved up to the front and tried to stay with the frontrunners, a couple of very talented junior high students. As I started off, Jay warned me that they were fast. I found that to be quite true.

For the first few intervals I was doing alright, but once we’d crossed over to the South side of the trail I began breathing harder, falling below a 2/2 pattern by the end of the speed portion and barely recovering during the one minute slower jog. I was pretty much wiped out by the end too as my time for the last interval clearly shows:

My recovery paces were between 8:40 and 9:00. I wasn’t going all out, but I was trying to keep good form, move cleanly, and (by the last set) to keep the kids in sight! I failed to do so on that last interval - they trucked around a corner and I just plain ran out of steam. Still, it was a really fun exercise. I did a nice, comfortable, slow (11:00ish) recovery run for the last half mile back to RunTex and hooked up with Jay and some of the other runners from our original group.

Once we’d cooled down somewhat we did five good long acceleration striders on the grass. Then, since we hadn’t done any drills before heading out, we had about 10 minutes of form/balance work - different jumps, fancy footwork, et cetera, after which I had to scramble to make my early morning meeting - which I did, but only by about two minutes.

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