Soul Buster Lite

Today was supposed to be the first of the Team Rogue Soul Busters. Last season was my first experience with the Soul Busters, and I only ran one because of an injury and because my race was 3 weeks earlier than everyone else's. I was really excited to run the planned SB, which was 3 miles warm up, 1 mile all out on a track, 20 mile cool down. After the pulled hamstring issue last Sunday, I knew that SB would not happen for me. There is no way I could go all out on a mile right now. The good news is plans changed for the whole team. A lot of people had a super hard run last week, so the SB became "lite" for today. It was an 8 mile descent, followed by an 8 mile ascent, then 4 miles at marathon goal pace on the track.

I met up 30 minutes early with Ken to get a 3 mile warm up. It takes me forever to warm up now with my hamstring issues so it was a nice thing to get that it. Then we started the descent. At first, there wasn't too much of a descent...it was all rollers. We did hit some nice downhills before the uphills. The uphills were rough. We ran on Pecos over to Mt. Bonnell all the way across 2222, then hit some nice hills in there...include Mountain Villa and Mountain Climber. It was like one massive uphill after the other. This part of the workout was the real soul buster for me. My legs were dead, my hamstring was tight, and I just didn't think I'd make it up the hills. I feel like I'm doing a better job recovering on the smaller uphills and flats, but I still don't feel very strong on the hills. It's either that or everyone I'm running with kicks butt on hills :) After the hills it was straight to the track. At this point I was a little worried about holding MGP for 4 miles. Originally it sounded easy by my legs were trashed.

According to mcmillan, my MGP is a 6:41 mile. I dropped that to 6:40 to make the math easy, so each lap on the track needed to be 100 seconds. No one in our group was shooting for that (some faster, some just a bit behind) so this was a good experience for me to lock in to a pace by myself, something I struggle with. I got so spoiled last season running with the 3:10 train there were times I didn't were a watch but I knew I could just lock in with them and be right on. My mile splits were pretty consistent. On the last 800m Steve told me to pick it up and try and gain ground on Larry and Ken. I knew there'd be know throwing down the hammer because if that happened I probably be sidelined with the hamstring. I did gain ground though, so that was good. Here are my splits:
6:37
6:40
6:37
6:13

All in all I'd say it was a successful day. I'm exhausted but pushed through it enough to hit my goals on the track.

pluses: good workout, time with family

minuses: sitting in a car driving to Houston