Track Workout Tuesday

I was on the track this morning for the first time since December!  The workout I had didn’t have to be done on the track, but since I was out of town for work I didn’t know of a flat course without potential traffic stops that I could run on, and I don’t like running fast stuff on unfamiliar courses anyhow.  Plus, I couldn’t get this workout to transfer to my Garmin watch from Garmin Connect, and with it mixing kilometer distances for the repeats and mile distances for the recoveries, it would have been a trick to do it on the road even if I was at home!

The workout was:  2 miles warm-up, 2 x 2K in 7:40-7:45, 2 x 1K in 3:35-3:40, half mile recovery jogs between all repeats, and 0.75 mile cool-down (for 8 miles total).  One of my friends who lives in the Kansas City area directed me to the Park Hill High School track, which was about 3 miles from where I was staying Monday night, and we checked it out on Monday evening to make sure it was open to the public.



No fence climbing to access the track is always a sight for sore eyes

I arrived at the track early on Tuesday morning and ran my warm-up off track, did a few leg swings and plyos, and was off.  The first 2000 went like clock-work; every single lap was 1:32.X for 7:43 total.  This pace was brisk but I could tell it was sustainable for the 2000s.  The second 2000 wasn’t quite as even, and I don’t remember my laps exactly except that I had to run a 1:30 final lap to tie my time for the first rep, and I did that for another 7:43.

While I felt good about the 1:32 laps and like I could do 1-2 more 2000s at that pace, dropping to 1:26-1:28 lap pace for the 1000s sounded really hard!  When I read this workout on paper I knew that the 1000s would be much harder for me than the 2000s; my endurance is there but I don’t have raw speed and I haven’t been doing speed work.  I knew that hitting the top of my goal range would be the best I could hope for.  I’d also looked back at last time I ran 1000s on the track (which was in September 2015), and for that workout my goal range had been 3:40-3:45 which I liked a lot better than today’s range! Not to mention it was 78 degrees even at 5:30 a.m. today.

I tried starting off the 1000s with a 1:28 lap, but came through in 1:29.  I sustained this 1:29.X for 2:59 through the 800 and a 3:44 first 1000.  I didn’t have much left and I knew I couldn’t go any faster, but I told myself just one more repeat as close to goal pace as I could, and finished up the second 1000 in a similar fashion in 3:45.

I typically don’t run my best while traveling, but I don’t necessarily think I would have run this any faster at home this morning.  I think my coach was ambitious on those 1000 paces, and that this went pretty much as well as it could have!  I’ll need to do a few more of these faster workouts before getting ambitious about any 5Ks for sure!