The plan for the day was to do 8×800M on the track. I started at RunTex and warmed up to Austin High, did the drills, then got going. I remember having checked out my previous times and aiming to hit these at around the 3:20 point. That’s in the bottom third of the 3:17-3:27 range McMillan gives me, which is just fine. Of course, that wasn’t counting the weather - it was only 75 degrees, but we literally had over 90% humidity, and that’s a big slice of no fun.

Mike and I got together, and actually stayed together for the entire workout. Well, for 6200M of it anyway. We did the first lap easy at 3:32 - its nice when a 7:06 pace counts as “easy” - then got ready to dig in. Our second lap felt harder, and it clocked by in a mere 3:31. Wait a second, 3:31? That’s right, we dug down and tore a second off the top. Obviously this wasn’t going to be the easy workout we’d both hoped it would be.

The good news is that we were able to keep whittling that time down with each circuit faster than the one before. By lap six we’d hit our 3:20 goal, lap seven saw it fall down to a very solid 3:17, and lap eight… we let it fly. The first 400M went by in 1:33, which would be a good showing for me if I stopped right there. I made it to about the 550M point, but started feeling weak and had to back off; my second 400 was 1:36 for a 3:09 last lap. Not bad, right? Well, Mike actually managed to pick it up! I wasn’t more than a second or two behind him at the 700M point, but he just found a new gear and hit negative splits for an incredible 3:00 even final effort. Very impressive!

More powerAde, stretching, and a run back to RunTex followed, then it was back to real life for another day.

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