Scattered weather patterns – Scattered thought patterns

With all this rain we’ve been having in Austin, and especially the flooding in the outskirts of town, 10 of the 12 dams in the area have opened floodgates. The nice thing about Lake travis, is that the water released comes from the very bottom of the lake, so it’s nice and cold. The water eventually makes it’s way down to lake Austin, then Townlake.
This morning we ran from Runtex over to the Austin High for our track workout. As we ran by the Stevie Ray Vaughn statue, we noticed that the air was much cooler. This was a direct result from the white caps and the turbulent water on town lake that had cooled down the air that was coming off the water. Pretty cool if you ask me.

The track workout is a CV workout. CV stands for Critical Velocity and is a newly discovered way to essentially get two workouts out of one.

“Critical velocity is a pace that you can sustain for some 45 minutes,” says exercise scientist and private coach Tom Schwartz. “For some people, this would be either just faster than or just slower than 10K race pace. By training an athlete at their critical velocity, a coach can improve the runner’s lactate threshold while simultaneously stimulating their VO2 MAX.” Coach Sisson told me this morning this is proving to be very effective for his UT Girls Cross Country team, so he has tweaked it to fit us Marathon runners.

The workout consists of running 5 laps at 15k pace (6:55 / mile for me). As it’s 2000 meters (5 laps and not 4 which would be a mile), that pace translates to an 8:30 finish time target. The workout is the same one we did abut 4 weeks ago. And were our times: 8:28 - 8:34 - 8:27 - 8:09.
Today, I couldn’t hit my 200 meter splits to save my life. I needed 52 second 200s but ran every one between 48 and 50 seconds. I just could not slow down.
I finished the 4 sets in 8:21 – 8:17 – 8:21 – 8:17. (9 – 13 seconds faster than What do those translate to in pace per mile, you ask? Well, right around 6:37 per mile.
Coach Ruthie thinks it’s good, as it simply means I’m getting fitter and faster. I like that!

Setting: It’s 5:11am in the morning, and I’m driving to my workout. I hit the light and SWPKWY and MoPac.
There was a car in the left lane, so I pulled up to the pole position in the middle lane. It’s 5AM,and this guy has all 4 windows in his old metallic green cavalier rolled down, and he’s blasting music. His music is so loud I can hear it over my radio, so I turned mine off to enjoy his. It wasn’t Pasito Tun Tun, but it was some other really kickin’ Ranchero / Tejano Style music, so I did a little jig just before the light turned Green.