Poop Treadmill

Today, everything felt perfect on the run.  Even though I felt sluggish and tired all day, I went out for the track workout as planned.  By the end of a calm and collected first 800m repeat, my body awoke as it usually does.

Corsairs Stadium, with no football team in sight! Woohoo!

I feel like I'm finally able to pace myself on 800m distance, instead of running the first 400m too fast and running in on fumes at the end of the second lap.  I dare say they felt comfortable.  When I trained for Green Bay and did repeats, I found myself struggling horribly on each and every one.  These were great.

I hit recoveries while Matt was on his repeats, so I caught some action shots.

Here's what happened:
1 mi warm-up and 1 mi cool-down (and 400m recovery between each repeat).
7 x 800m (goal 3:30):
3:29, 3:24 (forgot to lap after repeat), 3:31, 3:28, 3:29, 3:31, 3:27

Kind of a mess, but here's the Garmin readout:

While Matt and I did our cool down laps together, we discussed what makes a track session successful or not.  To us, it is more about being able to be consistent, not having one or two really fast ones and the rest fall off on the slow side.  It is about finishing fast on the last one, to still possess the power to do that.  He also said that running the cool down mile on a track is like running on a treadmill: boring.  Only a treadmill doesn't have little piles of deer poop like this track does.

Blurry deer cheerleader

With each repeat, I watched the various hues of the sunset change.  Each lap gave me a different sky, one more vibrant than the last.

Shot on one of my recoveries

I think this was my cool down

Deer came to spectate and munch on the football field.  By the end of the run, the sky turned completely dark and we walked back to the car.  Perfect timing.