Like the previous session, last night’s session was jam packed!  For some reason the clinic just seemed to double its participants.  Running must really be getting popular! 

As usual we started with a 5 lap easy warm-up run around the oval (2K) followed by the routines.  I arrived a bit late (a nasty habit) so together with some not-so-early-birds we were all grouped together for our own session of the drills.

The main set was 3 sets of 3 laps around the oval (3×3×400, 3.6K) with a 2 minute recovery between intervals and 400M recovery walk between sets.  This session was the Ultra debut of my GF405 so I was able to log our times:

I had fun with my running mates even though the pace we were keeping wasn’t that easy.  This is one of the things I love about the clinic: having running buddies.  Surely anyone can run on their own but for the sake of improvement it’s much better to have a buddy (or more).  We, the “seniors” of the clinic (those that were present since day one) were starting to know each other so we were all like students in a classroom having chats while resting (sometimes too much that the coaches had to call a timeout) and even during our cool-down routines jokes were being thrown so we’re all laughing while we’re doing our core exercises and stretching.

The core routines were back after being missing-in-action for a few sessions due to lack of time, a.k.a. lights out.  We didn’t experience lights out during this session (even if we passed 9PM) so we were able to complete our core routines which were more challenging than before.  Of course stretching was still there, but due to the absence of our beloved tarpaulin mats our elbows and knees took the toll (thank goodness for the rubberized surface).  After the session was over, most of us looked like we wiped the floor with our shirts.  Even my knees hurt (not because of running).