Notes
Hazard and I drove down to Banner Lakes to continue (complete?) my tour of central Iowa singletrack. My plan was to replicate an old Cedar Falls workout which was alternating 800's with an uphill. This is surprisingly hard to find, especially when you want the 800 loop to be fairly flat and straightforward.
My warmup consisted of looking for a good option, the flat Riverside trail was too far from hills, and the short loop I had in mind was much hillier than I remember. Thankfully I had forgotten about 1 connector trail that was super flat and straight. This seemed like a good option, but unfortunately I didn't explore the entire length of this trail as it actually ended just beyond where I had ran.
This lead to an improvised 1st rep of running up a hill and around to some MTB obstacles and down a deer path and back the way I came, finally getting to the hill 3 minutes later. The hill was steep and tough, but only 20sec long or so (this is Banner Lakes after all). By the 2nd rep, I had my plan: I would start a little further back, do a U turn in the parking lot after a quarter mile, then end a few meters before the hill for a short rest before ascending. This ended up working out pretty well, and my splits for the "800's" were: 2:22, 2:19, 2:14, 2:14, 2:11. The uphills stayed pretty much the same time.
I realized I didn't memorize how many 800's I've done before, but I decided on 6 early on and was happy with that.
Bad news is that on the 4th rep, my right hip/groin starting hurting (it had been tender the last few days as well). It felt better on the 5th, but then was pretty bad on the 6th. Smart me would have stopped during the last rep, but I finished. Optimistic about recovery though as my guess is it is a climbing injury that hopefully won't get worse with slower running.