I prepared myself for this one on Monday. I skipped all running and walking workouts and only went to spin to keep my legs somewhat fresh. I have less than 2 weeks until school starts again and I've been working on getting my sleep schedule back. I was actually up by 6:30 and out the door around 7:30 following multiple cups of coffee.
I have been researching track workouts for my half marathon goal pace and found this awesome article: Workout of the Week: Mile Repeats. The article touches on mile repeat workouts for 5K, 10K, half and marathon efforts which I LOVE since I often am trying to do my track workouts faster than half marathon pace.
Following a 3 mile warm-up and a stop at the grossest port-a-potty I've ever seen, I started my first repeat with the goal of 7:00 miles.
The first mile flew past with a perfect split of 7:00. I walked a 200 m rest and then started my second repeat. My Garmin was acting crazy beeping every 3 seconds with a "lap error" message on the screen. I have no idea what that was about and I also couldn't see my pace, so I ran the second repeat by feel. I ran a 6:34.
Apparently my body can go faster than my mind thinks it can.
With 2 miles down and hopefully 3-4 more, I wanted to up my pace but keep it conservative enough to finish my workout. I changed my goal pace to around 6:50 and hoped for the best. Mile 3 split: 6:49. My legs were starting to feel the workout at this point. Mile 4: 6:53, Mile 5: 6:50. I could feel that I had one or two more repeats in me. Mile 6 I really started to feel the fatigue in my quads with a split of 6:45. I felt that I could maybe pull off one more and decided that was a good place to stop. I didn't want to go for complete fatigue. I still had to make it home.
A 3 mile cool down to make it back to my front door and 4x 8-10 strides to keep my legs awake. I spent lots of time stretching and foam rolling before making my usual post-run smoothie.
There were fortunately no soccer boys this Track Tuesday, only maintenance men working on the field. Which I didn't mind until until one of them did this:
On my last mile repeat. Of course.
What is your workout today?
Are you a football fan? Running around a football field is making me miss lazy Sundays watching any and all games.
