Isn’t it amazing how word gets around in a tight-knit running group? Yes, I cut today’s workout short; I rode back with Gilbert instead of running back for a cooldown. No, I wasn’t injured. The only reason I did it was that I was late for a meeting. Anyway.

Met up at RunTex this morning at 5:45 for our hill workout, and there were surprisingly few people there; maybe 12 total. We headed out for a comfortable warmup, covering 2.7 miles and climing, oh, about 100 feet along the way. It’s a nice run, and we kept to a moderately reasonable 9:40 average pace, letting us natter along the way. Drills, strides, yadda yadda yadda, we’re ready to go. If you’ve missed my earlier descriptions, Wilke is a 300 meter hill that rises close to 100 feet - about 30 feet in the first half and another 60 or so in the second half. The plan was to do 7-10 repeats of the whole hill, then 3 backwards up the steep half, then 3 sprints up the final 20M or so.

I’m a little annoyed at myself on this one; I just did the minimums. Now, in the speed group we do 5-7, so this was my old maximum, but still its a bit of a cop-out. This workout just does me in though! My times … well, they weren’t bad but they certainly weren’t good, in seconds: 82, 90, 88, 93, 96, 102 (whoops), 90. And hey, 90 seconds for 300M is still an 8:00 pace… I was feeling pretty slow though, this is definately my weakest link.

Gilbert told me this time that I really, really needed both more upper body and core strength to do the hills. I’ve been working a little on my core, but this is the first time he mentioned that general upper body was a factor as well. I’ve said it before, I need to get my ass into the gym more often than once every 10 days or so. He did tell me that my form was good, which I’ve struggled to achieve out here, just that I’m weak where it counts for this workout.

On the way back I asked him what we were doing next week; he told me that we’d be doing 1000M repeats. Most people will run their Yasso pace - take your marathon time in hours:minutes and run 800M in that same time (but read as minutes:seconds). So for me, my target is a 3:30 so I’d run 800M in 3:30, or 1:45 per lap (a 7:00 pace). However, since I upped the ante by running my 400M repeats faster than he suggested, he wants me to use that time plus five seconds per lap; that’s a 1:41 lap or a 6:45 pace.

I think I can do that.

Tomorrow is another seven mile recovery run, which will bring my mid-week total up to just under 30 miles; on Saturday we have our first twenty miler to do. We’ll be running from the start of the old Freescale marathon course all the way down to the turn around at Lake Austin Blvd, then back but hopping onto the trail (which parallels the course) for the last few miles to end at RunTex. Since we’re starting the run at 5:30, I need to be at RunTex to carpool up there by around 5:10, which will mean getting up at some unholy hour to be ready. I don’t think I’m partying much this weekend.

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