Where’s the peanut butter?!

Tonight I felt like I was got back on the saddle at the track. At the time trial last week I did not take 27 seconds off my previous time - for the first time I added time to my last run. I really wasn’t feeling that enthusiastic about it. Not that you’d know that from how I started out as I paced with Rolando* for the first couple laps running something better than 1:20’s (which I knew was totally a mistake). I felt like bailing out after the first mile but remembered the day at Denali when I pledged to myself that I would never quit when some goal was looming, so I struggled through the next four laps and eventually finished. It was a totally respectable finish but that’s the good and bad thing about running — at the end of the run your friends or running partners can tell you whether they think you did a good job or not but you are the final judge of whatever you accomplished.

Tonight we had the familiar workout we’d done the two weeks before the time trial: 4×200’s with 200 recovery, followed by three 1 mile repeats with 90 second recovery, and then the 200’s again. Earlier in the day I was looking forward to the track but the spirit of that excitement was completely broken by the freezing scooter ride from work to the store before heading to the track. The nice people at Jock n Jill let me stash my stuff behind the race registration counter again, though, and there was some hot massage going on in the womens’ apparel section between Manos and Twinkles so things were definitely looking up!

The first time I did the workout, I did the 200’s at 36-38 seconds and the mile repeats at 6:20 and have whittled those times down a little, but tonight it was whittled down and felt good at the end. I kept all the 200’s between 34-35 even with an enormous puddle on the track in the first turn to avoid.

The mile repeats felt kind of hard at a 6:15-6:20 but totally manageable (and after talking with Tom** I think I should have run these faster). I did these with Kinicki, who was in the club a while back but has been travelling so hasn’t been there all summer. He seems totally cool and it’s good to have more people pushing it at that level but this is my first experience seeing someone I didn’t know at all just start showing up and go out and be an awesome runner. I got my first hint at how it could start to feel pretty competitive.  Some day.  Good thing I’m waaaay above that now!

We did the last batch of 200’s the “fun way,” taking turns leading.  I took the first one and caught some static from Lemmy loudly announcing I was slow. Yeah, well, everybody knows he’s a jerk.  He led one and I think Grayson and Rolando had the other two but I tried to drop back to get a clearer track and honestly can’t remember who had all the leads this week.

But the exciting thing was I haven’t really had a hard track workout since before Portland that I really enjoyed. At the start of the night the coach talked about the different workouts people would be doing and I got nostalgic and said that I, too, wanted to do a tempo run. I was laughed at.  Not by the coach but by Lemmy - did I mention what a jerk he can be??? - who told me that no, I never get to go back and run tempo runs again. So I did the track work, and it felt great and I was really glad to enjoy it like that again.

The ride home, though, was another story…

* I’ll be using made up names for people in the club now. If there is anyone in the club with any of these names, that’s news to me and that’s not who I’m talking about here.

** Until Tom ponies up and decides to pay to run with my club, he gets referred to by his real name.