First Track Workout

Day 129 - January 13, 2008

Today I finally got to the track. For me, speed workouts are broken into 4 phases. First is the warm-up where I run a comfortable pace for 1-2 miles to loosen up. The warm-up starts off slow and slowly builds up to normal running pace. Today, I ran 2 miles for warm-up on a street that has more hills than I would normally run for a warm-up, but it was a convenient run from the track.

The second phase is the speed phase. This is where I do the intervals at race pace or faster. Today, I ran two 1600 repeats in 6:02 and 6:07. My goal was to average 6:10. I don't think I could have run a third repeat today without hitting the wall, so I think I paced the workout properly.

The third phase is the recovery. Between intervals, I slowly run a 400 or an 800 to recover from the speed. This is really slow and my only focus is to get my breathing under control and be ready for the next interval.

The fourth phase is the cool down, and today it was a repeat of the warm-up, only slower. Depending on the workout, the cool down can be anywhere from 1 mile to 6 or 8. Most days it will only be 1, but if I want to make it a longer run, it is pretty easy to add on some really slow miles.

The plan is to incorporate one speed workout a week now that I'm training for the 10 miler. The number of speed miles will slowly increase and hopefully the average pace will drop, but for the 10 miler, I don't need to run them much faster. Building endurance will be much more important.

Day: 129 Time/Date: 4:30 PM 1/13/2008 Weather: Clear, 43F
Run: Track Workout (2x1600) Miles: 6.2 Time: 43:22 Pace: 7:00 min/mile
Miles to Date: 481.8 Total Running Time: 58:59:23