As long as I’m up and “bloggin'”, might as well add another one, eh? We did 2K repeats at Zilker on Thursday, and I think I may have actually done the training correctly. Gilbert emphasized that we were to run the first one slow and the last one fast, but of course he used much more flair and emphasis and specific examples. I must have taken it to heart because my splits were 8:02, 7:44, 7:20. Wait, rewind. I almost always, whether in a race or in training, start out too fast and end up struggling to the finish. I vowed to turn the page on this day and try something different.
I got put in the second group with the usual suspects and during the first two repeats there were a couple people ahead of me who usually aren’t ahead of me. It took every ounce of my ego-suprressing power not to run them down, but I need to have the bigger picture in mind. On the third repeat though, Gilbert said it was our last one and to run it fast. There’s much debate in the group on what exactly he means by that, or when he says “10K pace” or “80% effort”. Does anyone run a 10k pace at 80% effort? Is anyone not doing 100% effort by the end of a workout? We all wonder.
So for the third repeat it was Alex, Jorge and myself out front of our group and I felt really good. Both of those guys are definitely faster than me, and I kept waiting for my inevitable bonk but it never came. Around 1000m Jorge dropped out with some sort of leg issue, and it was me and Alex for the next 500m or so. Somewhere around the little incline up Stratford Drive I overtook him and like I said, brought it home in 7:20, a bit ahead of Alex. Since he’s faster than me, I wonder if I did that last repeat too hard, and he was doing a good “80% effort”. Oh well, I felt uncommonly good on that last repeat, and felt like it was a really great workout for me. Did I do something right?
