Track speedwork

I watched the start of Ironman Arizona on the live feed - how exciting to see a couple thousand athletes, including some that I know, all head out into the water and a day of exertion and challenges and unknowns! We're cheering for you!

I knew it would be a couple more hours before any athlete results came up, so I went out for a run.

It was clear and sunny and kind of cold (49*F) and I was thinking about that tough 10K at the end of the Columbia Triathlon that I have coming up in 6 weeks, so I decided to spice it up with a little of what passes for speedwork for me. I rarely do speedwork (I do one mile repeats fairly often, but seldom shorter distances, since most of my events require much more endurance than power/speed), but I'd like to have strong legs for that hilly 10K!

Four half-mile repeats (plus some recovery jogs) in:

• 4:40
• 4:28 - woo! an 8-second 800m PR!! Yay!
• 4:46
• 4:57

That's still a long, long, long way from the 3:31 that I'd need to qualify for the 800 in the National Senior Games, but if I actually worked on speedwork, it's not completely out of the question in the future some day!

Then I came back home, did a little yardwork, took four bins of recycling over to the big receptacles, and then came back inside to check up on the IMAZ results so far. Now I get this at ironmanlive.com, which SUCKS!:

"IronmanLive.com is currently down for scheduled maintenance. We will have the system restored shortly. We are extremely sorry for this inconvenience. We are working very quickly to minimize the disruption. This page will attempt to reload every few minutes, so if you would like to stand by, you can continue your visit once service is restored."

AND the live webcast is down. It looks like they were making some major overhauls of their websites, and today, unfortunately, was the test day. BUMMER! :-(