I got up early and arrived at the PhillyFit meeting place a half hour before the scheduled meeting. There were a handful of red team members there because last week our Coach told us to meet him early and he'd head out with us. Unfortunately, this didn't actually happen this week so I got up early for nothing. Very pesky.
When we headed out on the run I got elected to be in charge of timing our run/walk intervals. I think this was because I'd been out early with the Coach last week and because I might have been the only person with a watch. Anyway, we started out with a plan of doing 4/1 run to walk intervals and planned to make the intervals longer as we warmed up.
This soon proved to be a poorly executed plan. The small group I was timing was quickly revealed as having different levels of comfort with running at the pace I set. (I have no idea what that pace actually was.) Soon, there were three of us running together and 2 others far behind. I was having a really hard time communicating the plan to everybody and while I like helping people who are struggling I was pretty annoyed that I had to be dealing with this dilemma. I am not a coach right now and I wanted to concentrate on doing my own thing and not cow-towing to the stragglers. (I have no beef with the slower runners, by the way. My beef is with the coach and his assistants. One of them should have been with us in the back of the pack.) Anyway, at some point maybe about a mile into the run, the coach gathered us up together and made the three of us who were faster wait for the slower runners. I'm not quite sure why. We also picked up my sister at this point.
We continued running at the 4/1 interval until the turn around spot. By this time, one of us had broken out and was a little faster. One of us had developed a painful IT band and decided to walk and one of us had decided to slow the pace during the run segments. The other two slower folks were nowhere to be found. The result of this was that I ran the whole 2nd half of the long run by myself. I'm not sure if this is good or bad.
I kept up the 4/1 ratio because my brain was working pretty well with that and I didn't want to monkey with the plan. Over the 2nd half I caught the IT band walker, and the girl who had pulled ahead. I actually passed her and the people she'd been running with who had started out ahead of us at the beginning of the run. By the time I hit the six mile mark I was just seconds behind one of the coaches and another runner who I hadn't seen since we'd started the run.
My final time was 1:09:10 and I thought that was pretty good considering that I stopped all together for a minute or two to wait for people and didn't run as fast as I could for parts of this. That's an 11:31 pace and that's just about what I run all the time on the treadmill. I didn't struggle at all on the run except for a few minutes about a mile from the finish when I got a hint of a side stitch. I walked about a minute earlier than the watch suggested, breathed and took a drink and I then started up again without trouble.
My legs felt great the whole time and the next day too, so I'm happy. I don't want this timing job next week. I want to do my own thing and improve. I don't want to be responsible for the other runners. Maybe that makes me a jerk but I'm not in this to worry about them. I mean, I want to be nice, and encouraging and everything, and I'll still try to do that, I just don't want it to have a negative effect on my own progress.
We got snazzy PhillyFit t-shirts and Lance Armstrong type wrist bands that say "change your life". They're ugly grey but a cool idea.
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