Back in Track

Made a rare appearance at an actual track this morning for my training run.  The group that I ran a relay with back in the Spring does a regular track interval workout on Wednesday mornings, and for the first time this morning I didn't have some sort of conflict and was able to join them.  I'm running my second 5k this Saturday, and I'd like to try and go sub 20-minutes, but haven't been doing speedwork as part of my Ultra training and didn't really have a feel for my potential to blow-up if I tried to go out fast.

The results were moderately encouraging.  The workout was a 1-mile warmup, 10x400m intervals with 200m recovery between, and 1-mile cooldown.  I generally felt good throughout, and was able to do the last 2 400s at sub 6-min-mile pace, which is really pushing it for me.  Here's the data:

So .... in terms of the 5k this weekend, I'm confident enough to roll the dice and shoot for a 6:15/mile or faster pace, still with the real possibility of a spectacular flameout at the end.  That's part of the fun of a 5k though, right?

I Love Track. Tracky, track, track.

One of the dozens* of upsides to visiting my wife’s family in Northern VA is the chance to do a track workout at my old high school.  As I’ve mentioned in other posts, trying to run on a track in Cary is about as easy as trying to drop in on the President for an impromptu visit in the Oval Office.  There is apparently no more valuable resource in the state of North Carolina than a running track.  If the attack dogs don’t get you, the snipers will.

I had no idea how much I enjoyed speedwork on the track until I gave it a shot training for my last marathon.  Maybe I like it so much because I can’t really do it on a regular basis.  My running forbidden-fruit.

Hit the track Tuesday for some half-mile repeats and generally my wonky legs held up well.  1.5 years after purchase I finally looked at the Garmin manual, and actually used the interval training mode, which worked great.  Pacing is not a strength of mine overall, but my paces were surprisingly consistent for the half-miles.  The quarter-mile recoveries were progressively slower, which was part of the plan.  Here’s the data:

Pleased with that performance based on where I am in my training cycle.  I’ve got a lot of endurance to recapture after my injury downtime, but I’m feeling good overall.  Just gotta stay healthy.

*in case they are reading this