Thursday is normally track night with the JSRC, but tonight is also “Meet the Teacher” night at Kate’s school. Because of this, John sent me a substitute workout that I could run this morning.
I was expecting it to be similar to one of our Jim Spivey track workouts, but was a bit surprised when I got the following from John…
- 10-minute warmup
- 8 x 5-minutes at no faster than 6:30 pace with 30-second recoveries
- 10-minute cool down
This is a bit more intense than a normal track workout, but I’m guessing this is more in line with what John would draw up for marathon training if I didn’t normally go to JSRC workouts. Would love to know your thoughts on this John.
Anyway, to be honest I had a bit of trepidation about this morning after my so-so tempo workout on Tuesday, and experiencing hip and quad tightness yesterday. We got a bit of a break in the temps today, and this provided a very welcome boost. It was still fairly humid, but 64º felt nice.
Nathan and I met at the Bellevue United Methodist Church parking lot, and ran our 10-minute warmup out to the new section of the Harpeth River Greenway. Up to this point we had only done easy runs on this greenway, so it was nice this morning to break it in a little. For the workout we went 5-minutes out, did our 30-second recovery, and then did 5-minutes back.
The bizarre thing is that I felt MUCH better on the way back than I did on the way out, EVERY TIME! Nathan said he felt exactly the same way. You can see this in our average pace for the segments:
On the Way Out:
- Segment 1 – 6:48 (was still trying to get loose)
- Segment 3 – 6:42
- Segment 5 – 6:42
- Segment 7 – 6:41
On the Way Back:
- Segment 2 – 6:36
- Segment 4 – 6:36
- Segment 6 – 6:38
- Segment 8 – 6:37
The reason for this is a mystery to me. There does not appear to be a significant difference in elevation change between the two directions, and there was almost no wind to speak of. I’m guessing it was either a mental thing, or both of our Garmin watches just liked coming back better and showed a faster average. No idea.
Regardless, I felt much, much better today that I feared I would. It was a hard workout, but my legs felt strong, and the pace was not overwhelming. Also, unlike Tuesday, Nathan and I ran together the whole way, which was nice. Even though the intervals were 5-minutes each, it turned out to be almost exactly an 8 x 1200m workout. All of our segments were between .74 and .76 miles completed.
Once we finished the repeats, we ran our 10-minute cool down back to the cars at a very chill pace. In total we finished just over 8.5-miles with warmup and cool down at an average pace of 7:32 per mile.
Beast Mode…ON!