Wednesday at the Track

I had to wait until 1:30PM to begin my track workout yesterday, as I'd had a few meetings stacked up that I couldn't move. Even though I was hungry, it would be suicidal to eat much before a track workout, but about an hour and a half before, I made a half sandwich of cashew butter and fig jam (yum!), and then while in the meeting just before I left, I drank some Ultra Violence, as I was feeling a little peaked from a few glasses of wine the night before.

When I started, my legs didn't feel bad--I just felt tired. I did the 10' warmup on the treadmill and then 10' of strides on the track, and then the fun began. There were up to 5 people walking on the track at any given time while I was there. Sometimes I just want to mow them down, especially when they are walking two abreast--but instead, I just had fun buzzing them, and I'm sure they could hear me breathing and feel a nice breeze as I whizzed by. At one point, a huge man was entering the track going the wrong way as I was about to round a corner, and I just yelled at him, "HEADS UP!!!" so he would look up and get out of my way.

After the warmup, I did the first little piece of the workout, which is 3x(1' @5K pace, 30" easy), and I hit my watch, and had no clue how fast I was running. Then I started in on the main set, which is 3x(6' @10K pace, 2' @5K pace, 2' walking recovery). Even though I was caffeined up, I still felt tired, so I purposely tried to hold myself back, and figured whatever I could do on the day was just fine.

On the first repeat (remember, I'm fucking slow here), I ran a mile in the 8' total (which is right around my 5K pace or at least I think it is), and that means I was probably going too fast on the 10K piece. So on the second repetition, I tried to slow myself down, and ended up running another full mile. I was like WTF how is that happening? On the third repetition, I came in just a hair under a mile.

It wasn't until this morning that I calculated how fast I was running on the initial 5K warmup and then the pace I was running for the 10K and 5K pieces of the main set. Looks like I'm back to where I was 2 years ago when I felt like I was in really excellent shape after having trained for and run Goofy Challenge, or maybe even a little faster .

Maybe there's hope for me after all...maybe my little forced break due to the back injury was a good thing...

At any rate, none of it means jack shit unless I can pull off something good this Sunday. But, I know that I will be going into the little race having knocked out a solid training week (unlike some of the participants), so this first one will just be a "let's see what happens." Not that I'm competitive or anything...I guess I had better go stalk the other women in my age group and see what I'm up against. That's always fun!