I am waaaayyyyy ahead of schedule as far as my recovery from my latest injury, so I figured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to head to the track and see how things shook out. More to see how much fitness/speed I lost over the last month and half.

Now, I wasn’t planning on being stoopid on the track and it was more of check things out kind of session than one where I hammered the old body into submission. Plus, since it was raining lightly, with temps in the mid 60’s.

I brought Bennie along with the idea we would find a trail and go for a walk after the track. He was sitting in the van during my time on the track. He could see me and would bark each time I came into view to let me know he was okay. Which turned out to be a distraction because I was thinking about how he was doing versus focusing on the run, every time I was coming up the track.

The rain was fairly steady when I first started, so I got to check out the Beacon 2s on the track and in the rain. They did just fine, not a single issue with slipping around and didn’t have that sinking in feeling that some cushioned trainers have on the track or when running faster for me.

What did I end up doing:

1.0 – Warm-up

1.0 – Mile time trial based on effort effort and getting the feel for running faster. The first bit was quicker than I settled into a nice comfortably hard pace and picked it up a little for the last lap.

Nothing special, but it was better than I expected at 7:15 and not all that far from the 7:05 that I ran back on May 7th. This is something that I probably will attempt to do on at least a monthly basis, just as a check on where I am with my speed.

4 x .25 @ 1:48, 1:48, 1:51, 1:48 with a quarter rest between. I was still working on just running with a comfortably hard effort. Nothing super hard or going into the well at all. On the last quarter, I could feel the left hamstring pulling just a little on the home stretch. Nothing serious, but at that point I figured no more quarters and planned to just relax for a couple of laps to see how thing felt.

I wanted to get a total of 5-6 miles in this morning.

Unfortunately, the sun was starting to come out, which paired with the higher humidity raised the temperatures very quickly during that last lap. Bennie didn’t bark at me, but was standing on the arm rest with his tail wagging. At that point I got worried about how Bennie was doing in the van, so I stopped running to check on him..

He was fine, but with the temps climbing into the 70s and the sun coming out, I wasn’t going to put him back in the van to keep running.  So we just walked around the parking lot a bit, thought about the workout and I decided that I had passed my track test with flying colors.

Although the leg was a little sore when I got done, it wasn’t anything that I am worried about. I expect a bit of soreness when doing faster work after a long lay-off and the leg is still in healing mode and will be for a while longer. So being conservative and patient is allowing me to run and find out about where I am with my fitness.

Better than expected, but still a long ways to go to get to where I want to be.

On other news – our counter-tops are installed, but now to get the plumber back in (probably next week) to finish hooking up the sink and get all the hardware on, then new floors. Progress is good, but slow at times.

A good workout and while the times were not great, they were about where they should be for the amount of effort that I gave on the track today.