I raise the bar
Gilbert’s workout calendar for today declared that he was raising the bar. We were doing Wilke, but instead of the usual maximum of 7 or 10, today it was 20. I hadn’t done one of these workouts in a few weeks, so I was not sure what to expect. I think this might have been the first time I’ve taken the short version of the warm-up for this one. I joined everyone else in parking at Robert E Lee instead of running from RunTex. When we arrived at the hill, we found out that we were extending it a bit. We usually just run the incline portion, but this time we started lower and ran to the end of the street to get a little bit of flat running on both ends of each lap.
I took off running, taking it a little bit easier because I wanted to give myself a shot at a new record. It can’t have been that slow though, because I still started to lap some folks after a while. The nice thing was that with the longer recovery I really felt ready to go again each time I got to the bottom. I saw Gilbert after 7 of them, and I asked him how many I should really do. At that time, he said 10, so I kept going. On what was to be my last one, I decided I really wanted to do one more (since 10 was my previous record), and as I passed Gilbert and told him that he said I should do two more. So, I kept going. As I was coming down after number 12, he egged me on again, and I did two more. By then, a lot of people were leaving (including Gilbert), so I figured it was time to switch to backwards and get ready to leave. I did three of those backwards things, and I didn’t even fall once. I fumbled my way through a couple sprints after that, but I could tell I was pretty tired and they weren’t very good.
I feel good now, though. I totally conquered that hill today. After my cool down run, I made a stop at the gym for an upper body workout plus a couple core exercises and a couple light leg exercises. I think that hit the spot, too, because my body felt good the whole rest of the day.
Clearly, I’ve earned an easy recovery day tomorrow!