This has been a hard, but good week of training for the Rock n’ Roll NOLA Marathon next month. After Nathan, Paxton, and I did our tough tempo workout on Tuesday, I ended up getting two more speed/tempo workouts this week (in addition to easy shakeout runs on Wednesday and Friday):
Thursday Track Workout
The temperatures on Thursday night were slightly above 30º, but it felt much colder than that with a strong and persistent wind throughout. However, I ended up having my most consistent track workout since returning from the injury. Here’s a rundown of the workout with my splits:
- 2-mile warmup
- 6 x 100m stride outs
- 800m fresh (3:02) / 300m recovery
- 1200m fresh (4:39) / 400m recovery
- 800m fresh (3:02) / 300m recovery
- 1200m fresh (4:38) / 400m recovery
- 800m fresh (3:02)
- .75-mile cool down
The times weren’t blazing fast, but I’m very happy with the workout. This is especially true considering the wind and the fact that I ran the entire thing by myself since no one else was running my pace.
Saturday Marathon Workout
Today our group did a marathon workout over in Percy Warner Park, and it was one of the toughest ones we’ve ever done. Nathan, Brian, and I got in a couple of extra miles early, and then did most of the repeats together along with John. Here’s a rundown (not including the recoveries between intervals):
- 5-mile warmup
- 2 x 1-mile half marathon pace (6:47 Avg Pace)
- 12-minutes marathon pace (7:05 Avg Pace)
- 8 x 30-seconds hill repeats
- 15-minute marathon pace (7:08 Avg Pace)
- 1-mile half marathon pace (6:39 Avg Pace)
- 5-minute cool down
This looks hard enough on paper, but add to this the fact that the route had over 2,000’ of cumulative elevation gain, and you have one nasty workout….
Again however, I felt really good even though it was difficult. We hit or exceeded all of our goal paces throughout the workout. It made it a lot easier having several friends running with me the whole way. With recoveries I got in just over 16.5-miles for the day.
This week has been a big confidence boost towards NOLA. In total I finished just over 51-miles, which brings the monthly total to 196.
Beast Mode….ON!