What hectic day of training! I did my usual routine of driving to the expressway, 2 miles from the high school track where I do my training, parked my car, and jogged to the school as a warmup. It is more time efficient this way than driving all the way to the school. Plus I save gas and eliminate some air pollution.

During the jog I was thinking that it is great that I do this track workout on Thursday, instead of the usual Wednesday, so I'll probably avoid the fat people I wrote about last week. Well, I did. But instead of a nice empty track, I found the high school track team training there. I asked the coach politely if I could train there, but he asked me politely to use the outer lanes. That would be OK, except I can't run 2000 meters in the outer lanes. I contemplated it for a while, but I just saw no way of doing my workout. Also, the younguns were running pretty fast, so the coach was quite right that I would be problematic in the inner lane.

But my car was two miles away. I knew no open tracks nearby at all. I essentially gave up track training for the day, and I jogged back to the car. During which I thought I would just give myself the chance that the university track is open. I had given up on that track a long time ago, because it was almost always closed (locked) when I tried to use it. I even emailed somebody in the athletic department but I got no response. Anyway, I drove back to campus, parked the car in my usual lot, and jogged another half mile to the track.

And it was open. It is a very nice track. I took a sip of water and in 20 seconds, I was off to fast running. I was afraid that any second somebody shows up and sends me off, so I wasted no time. It was worrisome though that I already had almost 5 miles in my legs. I wasn't sure if I can run well after that crazy and long warmup.

Well, I could. 3 x 2000 meters with 800 m recoveries, and the fast splits were 7:22, 7:26, 7:24. It was never really painful (just discomfort). That is quite awesome. I seem to continue the tradition that the last track workout before a big race goes very well. I also recalled that in my sub-20 5K chasing days about 2 years ago, I ran 2 x 2000 meters in something like 7:50 or 7:55, and it was hard. So this is not bad at all. All intervals were at sub-6-minute mile pace.

The race is close. I'm optimistic about 1:25.