Shhh… Listen carefully. Did you hear that? No? That was the sound of something beautiful, the gentle tinkle of, oh, about ten seconds falling away from my 400M time. Alright, so now that I look at my last set its closer to 7 seconds but still, I feel pretty pumped about it.

I parked over at AHS and did a pretty short, very easy 3/4 mile warmup with Alex, keeping my HR down in the 140s the entire time. Next the drills, then it was time to be divided up into teams. I had decided I’d shoot for laps in the mid 90 second range, so I was thinking about trying to run with a faster team, but before I realized that the team being assembled would be right it was off and I was lining up with Jay and my other regular folk again.

Forgive me for being vague here, but I don’t have my watch in front of me. I’ll add a proper time/pace/hr table this evening. We did the first lap fairly conservatively, around 1:45, and it just felt really slow; I never had to work at it. After that I jumped way up to ~1:34, then down to 1:37 for the next one as I tried to find my pace - Gilbert yelled at me that I was going too hard if I couldn’t nail my speed any better than that. From there on out though I stayed right between 1:34 and 1:35, doing thirteen laps in total. He wanted me to do sixteen, but I told him that I had to get to the office for my Thursday meeting.

After my eleventh lap, the group in front of me took too long between their laps and I was able to sync up with them. I had realized some laps before that they were all doing around my (new) pace, but I wasn’t willing to cut my rest period down to 30 seconds to be able to run with them. Thanks to the extra time they took, I jumped in with them and did alright. They were picking it up somewhat for their last couple of laps, and I was trying to stay steady, but even so I wasn’t the last one across the line. I think I graduated speed groups today.

Don’t get me wrong, running 1:35 laps (that’s a 6:22 pace) was hard, but I could have done another three at that speed and I never got close to as winded as I did either the last time I did 400M repeats or the way I did on my 1:29 400M lap last week. I was going out a touch too fast, maybe 1-2 seconds fast on the first 100M, and a couple of times I actually had to coast it on in for the last 100M so as not to go too fast and get smacked down, but for the most part I felt really pretty good.

By the time I was done I just had enough time left to do 50 crunches, then make a run (alright, a walk) for the car. I’m very interested to see what my HR was doing compared to my other recent track workouts, because even on the thirteenth lap, while I had to work for it, I didn’t feel like there was any danger that I wouldn’t make it, if that makes sense. Comfortably hard, you could say.

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