I feel you, it's not my favourite thing either, I can do it and do a good job but I find it very draining, 2 hours of workshop and I'm exhausted whereas I know colleagues who find it fun and energising - whereas I'd happily spend all day doing a spreadsheet or detailed report which would be their worst nightmare! Hopefully your facilitation partner is more of an extrovert lol!
Things I find help, do your preparation, set out a good agenda with timings and tell your participants upfront (either email out in advance or right at the start) to make sure you cover what you need to in the session and minimise opportunities for sidetracking. Set out 'ground rules' at the start including listening to others, don't dominate the conversation, disagree without being disagreeable etc. Some people like to write these on a flip chart and display somewhere in the room if you think some people might be at risk of forgetting! I also like to have a 'car park' where I 'park' any off-topic or unhelpful interventions from the more opinionated types without having to tell them to shut it, 'oh thank you Bob for the really interesting thoughts about the biscuits in the staffroom, today we really wanted to cover the performance strategy and I want to make sure we hear from everyone so let's park that for the time being and make sure to cover it at a later session' (can be a mental car park or a physical one like a board or flipchart paper where you make a note of parked issues)
Don't forget there will likely be some shier and more reflective types amongst your participants too, you need to get them involved. Bring in some quieter time and opportunities for personal reflection as well as group discussions. If time I like to get people to quietly think about a key topic or question alone at first, jot down ideas and thoughts for themselves, then discuss in a pair or small group to compare notes, then have larger group discussions. This means you accommodate both the people who need the discussion and to bounce off others and those who are better sorting out their own thoughts privately. If you use the perennial facilitators favourite of sticky notes you can get people to give them to you after even if they couldn't quite get their point in during the meeting, the group can also use them to make mind maps or summaries on flipsharts etc and it makes the write-up after much easier if you have at least some written prompts from the participants. Even if you are using post-its though you probably need to sort out with your partner which of you is leading and which is note-taking at any given point (swap halfway) to make sure the one doing the talking doesn't forget stuff said to them, which is easily done but as a participant in these sorts of things there's nothing more frustrating than going along to one of these things (esp if like me they're not really your cup of tea!) and then feeling as though nothing whatsoever will be done with the output, so as facilitator I try to be really clear what the info is for, where it will go, what if anything they will hear back about and so on...