6 x 1 mile Repeats

Tonight, John Ferguson had us doing 1 mile repeats at Gibbon's park. With my hamstring issue, I wasn't sure how much I wanted to push things. I couldn't remember what I'd done in the past. John said to look at your target marathon pace and take off 30 seconds to 1 minute per mile. My target for a 3:30 or 3:25 marathon would be 8 minutes or 7:52 per mile. So I figured targeting a 7:20 pace would not be terrible. He had us doing a 2:30 break at a jog between repeats.

As it turns out, I wasn't able to run that slowly (at least at the beginning). Here are my splits:

7:08
7:11
7:15
7:11
7:12
7:11

Looking back a year and I was consistently banging off sub-7 minute miles during my repeats. I'm not sure that I could have done that tonight, but I was happy that I kept pretty consistent repeats for tonights workout. It gives me a benchmark for future workouts. Based on these numbers, though, I'm at 97% of where I was last year. Hopefully by November, I'm back to 100%!

Fartleks around Gibbons Park

We did fartleks ("speed play" in Swedish) around Gibbons Park tonight. The concept is to go fast for a certain distance, then slow to recover, and repeat. In this case, we ran fast for roughly 400 m., took a break for about 300 m., then fast for 600 m. and then another 300 m. break.

Here are my "fast" segments:
2:17
2:55

2:17
2:52

2:11
2:44

2:08
2:42

2:09
2:53

As you can see from the times above, I generally got faster with each lap -- until the very last one where I was just barely faster than my first 600 m(-ish) lap. Part of the reason that I got faster was that a young woman that was in the group, Christine, and I kept pushing each other to keep up an aggressive pace. But she stopped after 4 pairs of repeats so my last one wasn't quite as fast.

After this, The Legendary John Ferguson had us do hill repeats up the road down into the park. While I could feel my hamstring during the fartleks, I could _really_ feel it during the hill repeats. But you could tell that the faster runners definitely had the best strength and speed on the hill repeats.

Then 20 push-ups, 20 situps and 3 minutes of a plank.

So, since my hamstring didn't blow up on me, I'm pretty happy with how the workout ended!

Did a Ladder tonight. 400 m laps x 1, 2, 3, and 4 (so, 1600 m.) and then back down 3, 2 and 1 400 m. lap. Here are my splits:

400: 1:37 (3:57/k pace)
800: 3:31 (4:18/k)
1200: 5:18 (4:23/4:17/k)
1600: 7:06 (4:25/4:20/k)
1200: 5:32 (4:37/4:27)
800: 3:34 (4:23/k)
400: 1:39 (4:05/k)

So, not awful. The hamstring wasn't bugging me much -- and if it did, I just worked through it. I was particularly happy with my last two laps where I was tired and a bit sore, but kept working through it. Comparing to last year (see August 2011 blog posts), I was 3:27 for 800m. and 1:34 for 400 m. So just a few seconds per lap slower.