Today started off with an odd feeling, since Jay was hanging out down with the pack. For a minute I thought that I’d screwed something up by biking yesterday and that today was a recovery run for me (and a track workout for his pod). He soon let me know that he’d switched to the Monday/Wednesday group though, and all was right with the world. Not only that, but the weather today was much more cooperative than usual, ranging from 75-80 degrees with only 80% humidity. Take that, summer!

I chatted with the aforementioned Jay during the warmup from RunTex to Zilker park, and it was good to catch up a little. He was travelling, then I was, then our long run paces diverged… its been a while. Not that we talked about much of any significance, mind you. Its not like this was a long run. We got to the park and I was actually surprised that for once I wasn’t completely exhausted, even though I was operating on about 5 hours of sleep (and an 11PM IHOP dinner the night before). Did the drills, then gathered ’round Coach to hear what he had planned for us.

Today was pretty simple: five one-mile repeats, with the first one slower than the rest. Fair enough. We also found out that Saturday is going to be very easy, just 10-12 miles (maximum 12) and that we can even sleep in a bit first. That’s because on Monday morning we’ll do a ten mile race to see how we’re feeling. The good news is that we’ll get water every two miles on Monday, which will be a very welcome change. But that’s all in the future, I still had to get through today.

I ended up in Jay’s group - for some reason Jay “owns” whatever group he runs in, even though he’s new to this class - and we did the first lap very comfortably. We started out aiming for a 7:30 but realized we were going at more like an 8:00, picked it up a bit after a couple of minutes and finished out at 7:37 - close enough, and a nice start to the day. We had 2 minutes of rest between each lap, and I made sure to drink one (and only one) little pointy cup of Gatorade during each break. That seemed to work for me.

The first lap had been going counter-clockwise, which gave us a lot of slow uphills, a nice fast downhill in the middle, and a smaller uphill about a minute before the end. We changed direction every lap, so laps 2 and 4 had a steep uphill in the middle - those were harder for me, I think, since it took me a couple of minutes after each hill climb to get my breathing back where it needed to be.

During the break between laps 1 and 2 Gilbert told me that he’d wanted me in the next group up. Whew! I said that I wasn’t feeling up to it today - which is completely true, since I haven’t been getting a lot of rest lately. Still, its good (and a little scary) t know I’m being promoted. I’d like to find out how fast they ended up going actually, because we clocked our second lap in a much more respectable 6:57. Starting there, I was running pretty much even with Carrie, who did so well on the recent 22 miler, but a fairly consistent 10 seconds behind Amy whose fast-turnover super efficient running style has really taken off. I envy her form, and the results she’s seeing from it!

The good news is that I was able to shave a consistent 20+ seconds off my times from last time, plus do an additional lap. I didn’t feel great then, but hey I didn’t feel great today either, so maybe it all works out. Over nine miles today too, if you include the warmup and cooldown, which can’t hurt. One more odd thing - there were at least three different groups down running the same place that we were, and it was pretty weird since the others were doing shorter loops than we did - they’d even stop in odd places, which really messes you up if you’re behind one of them at the time.

After we were done I did have the chance to talk to Gilbert a little about my 22 mile issues. He said that rather than being hydration related (or, at least, rather than being wholly hydration related), that I was still having some core weakness. Since its been a few weeks since my last visit to the gym, I have to admit that he’s probably right. Maybe I can make it in tomorrow sometime. I obviously need the exercise…

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