Back On Track

This week, I had my first visit to the track since last summer.  For the past year, I’ve been doing interval workouts on the trail or the treadmill either due to weather conditions or to avoid crowds at the track.  But, I know I run intervals faster on the track and thought I should give it a go.  It felt good to be on the track again.  It reminded me of my high school days and pushed me to run harder…

Oh, yeah – I ran track in high school.  In the first version of my “About” page, I neglected to mention it.  Ooops!  Since I was so much better at field hockey in high school and quit track my senior year, I tend to forget.  I wasn’t our team’s fastest sprinter by any means.  In fact, the only events I did consistently were the long jump, triple jump, and the mile relay.  My other event would be the 100m, 200m, or 300m hurdles depending on what my coach needed me to run to help the team.

Tuesday’s workout was 8 x 200m @ mile pace w/400m recoveries.  After a 3 mile warm-up jog to the track, I started the interval workout.  The first couple of repetitions felt fine but after that, I needed more and more time to recover.  The reps were 0:46, 0:47, 0:46, 0:52, 0:46, 0:49, 0:48, 0:47.  According to my Hanson’s schedule, they should have been around 0:45.  I’ve really lost a step!

It was a good week overall, though.  It was my first 60+ mile week since early April when I started tapering for the Boston Marathon.  Most of the mileage was at an easy pace.  However, in addition to the track workout, I attempted a tempo run on Thursday.  The training program I’m following called for 4 miles @ 10K pace, which should have been in the 7:30 range, but I only managed 8:00 pace.  Still, it felt great running at a faster pace for a change since the rest of this week’s mileage was so much slower.  In another week or two, I’m hoping my body will have adjusted to the training load and the dog days of summer.