A story of going from being a non-runner to planning for a marathon in three years...

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Four by Four



Last night was supposed to be a "straights and curves" workout on the track. What does that mean? Basically it means you go fast on the straight parts of the track and you jog easy on the curved parts of the track.

Unfortunately the track is still closed.

Well, technically it's open but since the university is back in session they were using it for a soccer game (or maybe practice?) last night so it wasn't open to the public.

So Coach Holly had to improvise. It had been awhile since we'd done any intervals or anything truly speedy so she started us out easy. Two mile warm-up with drills followed by four (or six) 400s. The sidewalks that form the boundary of the university are almost a quarter mile on each side so it's easy to do 400s on them.

My goal was to do them at between a 7:30 and an 8:00 minute pace since my legs weren't used to short bursts of speed. Granted, I did run the River Run for Ryan at an 8:11 pace, but still.

The warm up felt good and I was able to pick up a little speed at the end. The 400s felt tough. I wasn't sure how fast to go because I couldn't really see the "finish line" of each quarter mile. Still, I managed to hit my goal pretty consistently:

1st 400 - 7:37 pace
2nd 400 - 7:58 pace
3rd 400 - 7:53 pace
4th 400 - 7:29 pace
Okay, maybe not that consistent.

Anyway, I decided to only do four instead of six 400s since my legs have been feeling pretty beat up recently.

Instead of doing a fourth lap with speed intervals I just did a cool down mile for a total of 4.8 miles for the evening.

And then I rode my bike home (oh, did I forget to mention I rode my bike to the track) where I promptly forgot to stop my Garmin. Meaning I apparently had the most epically slow 3 mile bike ride ever. Not that I can show you, though, because my Garmin decided it didn't want to upload my run or bike data to my computer. Stupid technology.