Speeding in the dark

If the average person was driving through Magness Creek last night they would have been wondering what all the weird little flashing lights were and all these reflective people running around. I guess if your a total die hard runner this is what you do. At a very chilly 43 degrees, the average couch potato would surely be thinking they have been invaded my Martians or something as no one in their right mind would be running in the dark when its cold outside. For the Tuesday Night Flyer's though, darkness is not a problem.

It was cold at the running clinic last night and after a short discussion with Coach Dennis we were all anxious to get going and get warmed up. One of our New York Marathon lady heroines was there, Jackie, who finished the marathon in 4:58 something even though she had severe cramping problems. This was discussed some with Dennis and I was very interested as I was still trying to figure out what caused mine on my last 20 miler. With the normal compliment of ladies, we also had a couple more guys tonight which was nice. Kelly's husband Robert was there and since we run close to the same pace, Dennis paired him up with me to run since this was his first night.

We did our normal .6 warm up run to the starting point down in the neighborhood. I was running way too fast in the warm up I could tell but I guess it was the cold weather. It felt good! We started with 4x strides to get the heart rate pumping and the legs stretched out some. The intermediate group was tasked with a 1x1000m, 1x1200m, 1x800m and then 3xstrides. Robert and I started our first 1000 and the beginning felt pretty slow at first which is ok as I knew we would get faster as we went. I made the mistake of trying to use my garmin's average pace to pace by rather than timing the 200m splits. We were suppose to do lactate threshold pace which for me should have been about a 9:25. The first 1000 was came in at 5:28 with an average pace of 8:51. A little fast, but it really felt slow. Weird. After a 4 minute rest we went right into our 1200. This time I thought we would slow down just a hair and try to hit our pace. Well, again, the garmin fooled me. I also missed the stopping mark and ended up running a little over 1448 meters instead of 1200. It was WAY to fast. 1448m was .9 miles and we did it in 6:57 or an average pace of 7:47. Dang, I should have done a timed mile tonight as I would have blown 8 minutes away!

After a 5 minute cool down we figured out in our heads what our splits should be at every 200m. We were going to nail it this time, not too fast and not too slow. We hit the first 200 mark probably 5 seconds too fast. Not bad. Next 200 mark we were just a little slow so I picked it up a little. Next 200 i started not even thinking about the time. I guess this was where I messed up because I thought the next mark was 800m but in reality it was only 600. Even though we still just went a little over 600, our average pace figured out to be 9:17. At least this time we had gotten our pace almost right. Even though we missed a couple of our stopping marks, we still got the same benefits of the workout so it was all good.

We finished with our 3 strides, then talked with some of the others. A young man named Josh has been there for the past couple weeks so I took the opportunity to try recruiting him for the Cruisers. He is VERY FAST. He won the Magness Creek 5k and came in second at Cabot Fest. I think he runs a 15-16 minute 5k. I ran back to the school with him and we talked more. He is very interested in the Cruisers, the Grand Prix series and loves running on the Tuesday nights so hopefully we will have a new Men's Team member! This guy could really turn some heads in the Grand Prix, especially with the added speed work that Dennis gives.

By the way, Dennis wants to move Annette and I to the advanced group so maybe after the marathon we will do that. Right now the marathon is my only goal, afterwards I plan on regrouping and making a plan for 2008.