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October 15, 2004
Late Night
Yesterday, as usual, was the "longer interval" night at the track. Earlier in the day, I was concerned about even being able to run at night, much less do a workout. When I woke up for work it was pouring. In fact, it poured for most of the day. It was raining so hard that I would not have gone out to run in it. I don't mind some rain, but very heavy rain is another story.
Anyhow, I got there and we had a really small group. For some reason, Thursdays have less runners show up. We did our usual warm-up, which I never time, but I've been told that it is right about 2.5 miles. The workout was 4 x 1600 with an 800 jog. This week was supposed to still be "push and cruise" so the jogs are still on the quick side. Next week we do a workout where the jogs are slower, but I digress. There were actually two guys running with me. I wrote about one of them earlier, he'll sit on my shoulder and then race the last 200 meters. He was driving me crazy on the first interval. He kept coughing and moaning during it. Anyhow, he's racing Saturday morning, so he didn't do the full workout and decided that he wanted to really let it rip for a while. The other guy who I was running with and I didn't mind at all and just let him go. On the third mile, another guy who has never ever finished a workout with the group decided to jump in after the first 400 and push the pace since he had fresh legs. Believe me, I was ticked. One of my pet peeves in our group is the people who do selective workouts, jump in and out and then ask why you don't want to race the last interval.
OK, enough b*tching about how much other people at the track got me mad last night. The school had the one barrier up, so we had to run out to lane 4 on the top turn. I find that it stops most of my momentum when I have to veer out and then make the sharp turn back into the inside lane. My times are all a little bit slower because of this, but I would have been happy with these splits without the barrier up. I hit the 1600s in 6:10, 6:07, 6:10 and 6:15. All of my recoveries were around 3:43 for the 800 so I did keep the pace up on the jog. In the middle of the third mile, the annoying guy says "geez you really know how to pace, we've been dead on for each of these". I'll take it as a compliment, but then he dropped the hammer about 100 meters later. I don't check my splits at each quarter since I want to learn what the pace feels like without having constant feedback because you can't check at every 400 meters in a road race. The guy who I was running with said we took the last 1600 out in over 3:10 so it would have been faster. We finished up with the 2.5 mile warm-down for a total of 11 miles for the night.
After the workout a bunch of us went out for drinks. Stupid me who rarely drinks had a few drinks on an empty stomach and never ate dinner. The end of the night was not really pretty. To make matters worse, I took a nap yesterday afternoon and when I set the alarm for this morning, I set it for PM not AM. I woke up for work at 6:45 when I need to be there by 7:00. I made a quick call to let them know I overslept and would be in soon. Thankfully, I live pretty close, so traffic wasn't too bad. I took a quick shower, threw on some clothes, dried my hair, made my coffee, and made it to work at 7:20. By lunch time I was starving, so I went down to the kitchen to get my yogurt and it was gone! A girl who I work with thought it was hers and opened it, licked the lid, said yuck and gave it away. She didn't even look at the flavor to know that it was not hers. Of course I would not have eaten it after she licked the lid, that is so nasty.
Today is my regularly scheduled day off. Since it is pretty gross out and I'm pretty beat from my wild night I decided not to do any cross-training. I'm playing with the idea of jumping in a 5K on Sunday. My legs feel pretty good, so I might do a not quite as long as usual run tomorrow and then race on Sunday. Tonight I am definitely not doing anything, last night was a night out enough for a few weeks!
Posted by Blondie at October 15, 2004 04:31 PM