Yes, another Tuesday night post means more giddiness about running with the RRB. I continue to really enjoy our workouts, feeling like every week I’m pushing myself and getting stronger.
Today was special for another reason though too – every week someone in the group is awarded Coco, the group mascot, generally for some sort of running-related achievement. Coco gets to come home with you, and you give her some flair and return her the following week. If you forget, you owe the group beer! At the end of the year they count up all the times she’s been awarded to each member, she gets disrobed and the cycle starts anew. One week after officially joining the club, I received Coco for my big PR last week. I joked to the group that shaving 4 minutes off after just a week of being with the club was setting a dangerous precedent 
It’s silly, but it’s a nice contributor to team morale and I love the idea of it.
Of course, the question is what flair I should give her. Something Canadian, or something roller derby? While I don’t skate anymore, it’s recent enough that it’d make sense. Heh – maybe I should give her some of my old gear!
Oh, and also the people I run with are flat-out sick runners. About 5 members of the club are running marathons this weekend, so they did a different workout after the warmup. 4×5:00 at marathon pace. They all ran together (2 girls and 3 guys) and afterwards they were reviewing their splits and it sounded like they averaged a 6:15 pace… Sick, I tell you!
As for me – we did 4x:45, 4×2:00, 4×1:00, then a steady-state 5:00. After last week I told myself not to go out too hard. I think it helped that many of our fast folks were in the marathon group, I wasn’t tempted to try to hang with them!
45 seconds
We had a 90 second recovery between each of these, so Colleen told us to really go nice and fast, we were to focus on quick turnover.
1 :45 – 6:12
2 :45 – 5:57
3 :45 – 5:42
4 :45 – 5:29
Hurray on getting faster with each one!
2:00
I wanted to be conservative on these and not die. Supposedly our target pace was 5K-10K pace.
1 2:00 – 6:33
2 2:00 – 6:24
3 2:00 – 6:04
4 2:00 – 6:13
I was feeling it during this last one but I pushed it at the end when I realized there were only 20-some seconds left. Still a respectable pace!
1:00
Then we got to 1 minute one, 1 minute recovery. Colleen said these should be faster than our :45 because we were warmed up. Wha??? BUT, we were on the road so I felt more comfortable letting loose without worrying about twists or turns or stepping on people. I definitely tried to leave it on the track! (And my Garmin complained that I was doing just that)
1 1:00 – 5:37
2 1:00 – 5:28
3 1:00 – 5:34
4 1:00 – 5:27
And then the hard work seemed to be over.. except these folks dont seem to think “Steady state” means slow… we did over a quarter of a mile in this 5 minutes, with an average pace of 6:37. In the last 30 seconds I tried to catch the guy ahead of me and managed to hit the highest level of my heart rate in this section (189). I apparently also don’t know the meaning of steady state (note: at 3:00 we turned around and headed back, hence the slowing to turn)
THEN it was over, and we jogged back to the parking lot.
Total: 8.51 miles in 1:07:43 (7:57 pace). Average heart rate 163, max 189.
I continue to love this training..!
