track!

Thursday's workout was a speed workout at the track. We did 600/400/200 repeats, where each repeat consisted of the following:

600m run/200m jog/400m run/200m jog/200m run

My legs were pretty sore from Tuesday, so I was a little bummed to see so many people line up for doing a pace of 1:20/lap. That's a little fast for me, but what the hell, I figured I'd try. A co-worker Kurt who has done a lot of running had suggested that I trying running more often at pace considerably faster than my 5K goal pace. (FYI, my goal pace is 6:00/mile) Makes sense right? Only I certainly had avoided doing much of that in the past. In general, I've been happy to just do tons of repeats at a 6:00 pace and maybe slightly faster, but I usually don't push myself enough. So anyway, 1:20/lap is about 5:20/mile, so that would be in line with Kurt's suggestion. And I could always slow down if (when) I get too tired. Also, Gilbert did mention that people running the Daisy 5K should only do 2 sets, but that sounded kinda wimpy to me so I tried to pretend I wasn't paying attention.

Lemme see, my pace group consisted of about 9 people (NINE people, can you believe it? it's a good time to be a nooner.), and I was pretty much in 9th place the whole time. The first set I just tried to suck it up, assuming it would get less painful once I got used to it. Unfortunately, it never got less painful, and the second set almost killed me. My legs were feeling completely shot, and the fact that it was hottest day so far didn't help.

I started on the 3rd set, but I noticed a couple of people running the 5K had called it day. Hmm, suddenly Gilbert's suggestion of 2 sets wasn't sounding so wimpy. In fact it was sounding kind of appealing. Plus, you know, I didn't want to show up my fellow runners and make them feel bad for cutting off their workouts while I kept going. That would be really uncool of me. So I cut off the 600m I had started after 400m and did one last fast 400m after a little extra rest. (I figured my legs were already toast, so what's the harm?)

600/400/200 #1 : 2:03, 1:21, :40
600/400/200 #2 : 2:03, 1:23, :40
400m x 2 : 1:20, 1:13

If there's a silver lining to how tired I now feel after the workout, it's that I have a good excuse to run a crappy time at the Daisy 5K. My legs feel much worse than they did after running 2 tempos last week. Plus, I'm not sure what to make of the weather, it's supposed to be in the low 60s, which is kinda warm, but the humidity isn't supposed to be that bad, so maybe it will turn out to be OK. My goal remains to improve 15 seconds over last week's performance of 19:30. But whereas last week I felt pretty confident about hitting 19:30, this week my confidence is pretty low. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I'll try to go out fast and see how long I can take it.

The fun part of the workout was talking about snowboarding with Karen (who apparently has the same issues with her lead calf that I did) and ultimate with Sam (who seems to have had a much more illustrious ultimate career than I did). If we could have worked in some talk about Arsenal and Obama, my evening would have been complete. (By the way, Arsenal plays Middlesbrough at noon on Saturday on Fox Soccer Channel.)

As for primary news, Hillary was interviewed on NPR yesterday morning claiming that the Michigan primary, in which she was the only candidate on the ballot, was a fair election. Um, and that's from a person who might be next president of... not some third world dictatorship, but of our country. Ugh. Interesting standards about fairness to say the least. The interview can be found here. One of the comments about the interview that I thought was pretty accurate was: "We've suffered enough with a president who interprets reality to fit their own selfish goals. We don't need another one." One of my co-workers described the Clinton strategy of late as scorched earth, which seems apt to me. She seems to making sure that if she doesn't get the nomination, she's taking the whole party down with her. Anyway, regardless of who you support, you've got to admit that Republicans must be cartwheeling with joy about the self-destruction going on with the Democratic candidates.

OK, so expect an excuse-laden race report sometime this weekend. Hopefully getting to watch the Arsenal game after the race will cheer me up.