I just checked. Six weeks ago, I ran 13X400M at around 95 seconds per lap. I was pretty excited about it - not only was it faster than I was “supposed” to go, it was a solid 7 seconds faster than the last time I had done them. Today’s run was, if anything, slightly slower, but in a very good way. Let me explain.

I started out by heading over directly to AHS rather than meeting the group at RunTex. I was running a little late, and wasn’t sure that I’d be able to make it in time the other way. I ran a half mile warmup, pausing in the middle to remove a dime from my right shoe. I don’t know about stopping on one, but running on a dime at least can really hurt. The rest of the guys started trickling in then, along with a ton of other runners. The track was triple-booked this morning, which meant that over 100 of us were out there - it turned out to be a non-issue, but I’m sure it could have been nasty.

Today Mike and I headed out together, since we’re both finding ourselves in an awkward midrange between Jay’s pod and Frank’s group. This worked out well - we kept each other fast, and slow, when necessary. After our first three laps Gilbert told us that we were going too hard; he wanted us to be relaxed and concentrating on form, not going all out.

No, that last lap is not a typo. It wasn’t that long ago that a 1:29 was my PR for the 400M distance. Now I shaved five seconds off it at the end of another hard workout. Mike smacked his out of the park with a 1:22, but I couldn’t catch him over the last 100M. Actually the workout wasn’t as hard as it might look, since we were keeping it fairly easy, but coming on the heels of Monday’s 10 Mile Time Trial made it a whole lot more challenging. Maybe next time we do these, I can stay down in the 92-93 second range the whole time without straining.

There were a couple of times during the laps today that I felt that mystical running form just click in again. I was going for it with tight abs, tall posture, slight forward lean, low shoulders, and it just worked. I wasn’t able to hold onto it for more than about 100M at a time though, since distractions from other runners on the track seemed to snap me out of it. Now that I know what it feels like, I’m going to keep searching it out. As a counterpoint I did notice that I was doing some pretty bad heel strikes at times, probably because I’m still tired. Something else I need to work on.

My last running post was a little pessimistic. During my cooldown run I had the chance to chat some with Jason, and it doesn’t sound like my current speed is much different from his when he ran his first sub 3:30, a 3:28 at Freescale 2004. NYC is a harder course, but I’ve been doing a greater intensity workout series leading up to it. Again, its far from guaranteed (and I’ll still be very happy just to get a 3:3X chip time), but that did boost my confidence a little more.

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