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Matt is back! (on the track!)

December 26, 2020 (Afternoon)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
My college teammate Andy Schmegel has started doing twice-a-week workouts and has more or less convinced me to join, at least weekly. A few weeks ago we did a rather humiliating 2-mile time trial in which I couldn't even keep up my half-marathon pace for 2 miles, but last week we did 5 x Rittenhouse hills which went better. Today was my first time doing a real track workout since leaving London in March. Our goal was to run 10 400s with a full lap recovery, maybe stretching it twelve if we were feeling good. After the first one, I felt like we were going unsustainably fast, and by the second I was having doubts about whether I could pull off more than 8 of them. But I remembered from past workouts that these things sometimes get better as you get into them and your body adjusts, and sure enough, I think that's precisely what happened. We took turns leading which helped a lot mentally since I was always faster and more confident when I took the lead. It also allowed us to keep 6 feet of separation. Andy is certainly in better shape so on the laps where he led I was well out of covid range. I felt more and more confident as I went.

There was a girl there stretching on the high jump area during our first couple pickups who looked like she knew what she was doing. She ran about 300m at a pretty swift pace before disappearing into the athletic fields and reappearing every couple of laps. In order to give us something to take our minds off *our* workout, we started making bets on what kind of workout *she* was doing. I thought she a high schooler doing intervals and Andy thought she was a post-collegiate runner doing a 5k time trial. We ran into her during our cooldown and turns out we were both right, on average--she runs for UMBC (so she's IN college), and she was doing a 2x2 mile workout, which is basically halfway between what each of us thought her workout was. She told us she knew we were legit runners because Andy was wearing shorts and it was 25 degrees out.

On the whole, I'm very pleased. I ended up stopping at 10 like I'd planned, but Andy wanted to do 2 more. I cheered him on for his 11th, but then secretly jumped in behind him on his 12th. Then on our cooldown, I made us go around the track rather than meandering around the Blair campus. At the 200m mark I told him "I'll meet you back here in a lap," and immediately took off on a final 12th 400m pickup of my own, my fastest of the day. While I've certainly done faster workouts than this, these times are up to my standards for this point in my training and all in all, I'm quite excited about getting further in shape.