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October 25, 2004
Only one more week...
of candy corn. Even though you can buy the stuff all year long, I only allow myself to eat it during October. I realize that it goes on sale the day after Halloween, but I can't let myself eat it during November or the rest of the year. It really is the only seasonal candy that I get excited about eating. By limiting consumption to only a short period of time, I can truly savor it and look forward to it the following year.
I was wiped out today when I got home from work. I woke up before the alarm went off this morning. That usually is not too bad of a thing, but when it is 4:00 and you don't have to get up until 5:30 and can't get back to sleep, well, it's just a little bit on the early side. Not that 5:30 is exactly sleeping in. I tried to nap for a little bit in the afternoon, but just could not fall asleep.
After I worked on the foam roller for a few minutes, I headed over to the track. We actually started on time for once. We're supposed to head out on the warm-up at 5:30, but usually don't get started until more like 5:40. J made the decision that since a bunch of us are supposed to go to a race on Sunday that we should flip our workouts for the week, meaning do the longer intervals tonight and the shorter intervals on Thursday. This meant that we were doing 5 x 1000 with a 600 jog to make counting easy. Ideally these should be right around 10K pace. The track now has two barriers up out over the inside four lanes, one in each curve. We believe that these affect each quarter by at least 2, if not 3 seconds. Anyhow, my quads were quite tender from this weekend. I think that it is actually from running slower than I usually do on the downhill portion of the course. I was not too sure how these 1000s were going to feel. The first two I hit in 3:43 (take at least 5 seconds off, a bit on the fast side), the next 3 when I felt pretty beat up were pretty much right on target at 3:49. The 600 recoveries were quick, as I usually do. The one guy who jogs around in the football field was there and jumped in with me for numbers 2 and 3, but then jumped in on the two guys who were running a little in front of me for numbers 4 and 5. Mentally, this was a very difficult workout because I was running on my own and I was not feeling too fresh. Including warm-up and warm-down, the night came to 10 miles.
Since I only plan on doing the race on Sunday as a tempo effort, not a race effort, Thursday is not as much of a cutdown workout. I'll still do the shorter intervals, but I'll do more of them than everyone else. Tonight, I was probably the only person who was running the intervals at anything close to 10K pace. J said that his were closer to 5K pace and the two guys who were running in front of me were much closer to 5K pace. In the past year, I have gotten much better about trying to do my longer intervals at the right pace. Running them way faster than race pace does not help me that much. I have to get my body used to doing the pace I want to shoot for in a race. I think that I'm going to be doing a 10K in two weeks and would like to average just under 6s for the race. If I tried to do these 1000s much faster than I did it would not help me for the race.
Now I need to catch up on what everyone is up to. Only 8 more days until election day (and a day off from work for me!)
Posted by Blondie at October 25, 2004 08:07 PM