Tuesday Night Run

When I saw my friend Bill Dwyer at Run The Woodlands 5K Saturday morning, he told me about the Ten 4 Texas training group from Luke's Locker workout Tuesday night at Knox Middle School in Oak Ridge. I said that I might come out even though it might mean juggling the days on the schedule for this week - which is basically a repeat of last with a couple of more miles on the weekend long run.

Since it was a combined workout with Team Woodlands Team In Training, I had a chance to visit a little bit with TNT's Carol Steele and pro triathlete Kim Hager, who works with Bill and Debbie Tripp in working with the Ten 4 Texas group. (Carol is doing her first triathlon this Sunday at Try Andy's Tri!)

The workout called for 5 miles on the track getting progressively faster each mile.

Well ... with a half mile warmup, I logged 4.5 miles for the night followed by 30 minutes on the stationery bike at Bally's on the way home. (Maybe talking to Kim rubbed off on me a little bit!)

Bill wanted every one to hit the first mile in between 9:30 and 10 minutes.
And what did I go and do? 9:35.11. Nothing like hitting the front end of things.

I basically maintained it for mile 2 with a 9:40.24, but let it slide in the third mile to 10:01.68 before admitting that I wasn't ready to try and push through mile 4 and 5 at the same pace. Which is kind of nuts because I've done it before in races -- and this was a speed workout!

I threw in a last mile of 11:26.77 as a little cooldown (6:03.12/5:23.65) to have posted three miles in 29:16.92 and four in 40:43.69. (I've got some work to do as I ran 29:15 for 3.1 just two Saturdays ago, but it was a little cooler too.)

Here are the splits:

Mile 1 -- 2:20, 2:23, 2:26, 2:26
Mile 2 -- 2:27, 2:22, 2:24, 2:27
Mile 3 -- 2:32, 2:32, 2:28, 2:30

What you can't see in the numbers is that in the middle of mile 2, I caught a runner in front of me after Bill said, "That's Sharon if you catch up to her." Well, heck, I took it as kind of a challenge. When I caught up to her at the end of lap 7, it was kind of like waving a red flag at a bull. Coming out of the first turn, she poured it on. (She later said that she saw that she had been slowing down and decided to speed it up. Well, that she did.)

Through 2 miles, I was second and in the third mile, three of the TNT runners who are training for Houston in January passed me as they executed the entire 5-mile workout flawlessly. (Two of them had done RTW before so I knew what their times were and didn't feel bad at all.)

After the 3rd mile, I kind of mentally shut down. Chasing Sharon in laps 6 and 7 and then losing her in lap 8 kind of sucked the steam out of me.

Still a good workout overall, but plenty of work to do.