Week 9 – Key Run Workout #1

After Sunday’s tough half marathon, I wasn’t sure whether to run key workout #1 after work this afternoon, early tomorrow morning to avoid the heat or tomorrow afternoon once I’ve had an extra rest day. In the end I decided I wanted to get the workout out of the way, so waited a couple of hours before heading back to the track around 6:30pm. I was hoping it would be a little cooler, but even though the sun was going down quickly, the temperature was still 84°F.

Today’s workout called for a 15-20 minute easy warm up, followed by a mile at 5:39 pace (ouch!), 2 miles at an undetermined pace and 2x800m at 5:18 per mile pace (ouch again!). I couldn’t find a reference in the Run Less, Run Faster book to the 2 mile pace, so just decided to run slower than the above mile pace, but faster than 6:00 minutes per mile pace.

In previous track workouts I’ve used the actual track to determine my distance and pace, but tonight I programmed a workout into my Garmin Forerunner 305 to avoid having to press the lap button and keep checking my splits. If I ran too slow, my good friend the Garmin would soon let me know

Somewhat surprisingly, I was able to run the first mile in 5 minutes 24 seconds. According to my Garmin I covered a mile, but actually I ran quite a bit less than 4 laps of the track. Oh well, the Garmin doesn’t lie, does it?

After an all too quick 400m rest interval, I set off on the 2 mile part of the workout. I planned on staying as relaxed as possible for the first half and then picking it up for the second half, but it didn’t quite work out that way. I ended up hanging on for grim death, but was happy to see my split as 11 minutes 23 seconds (5:41.5 per mile).

This time I had the luxury of a 800m rest interval before finishing off the workout with 2 fast 800m’s. The first one was a solid 2:42 (3 seconds outside the goal), but I nailed the 2:39 on the last one with a last gasp effort.

Oh what a difference a couple of hours makes. It was still warm, but with the sun going down, the worst of the heat had gone for the day. Maybe I should have been running at this time for last 7 or 8 weeks?

Now I’m looking forward to Thursday’s workout and I’m so glad I decided to “get this one out of the way”. Not a bad effort at all, especially considering the race just 48 hours ago.

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