Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Speedwork is harder without moral support

I got up semi-early this morning...although not as early as I wanted to, in order to get my speedwork out of the way since we were going to my parents for dinner tonight. I wanted to be up and at the track by six thirty, but when I rolled over and checked the time/temperature readout, it was already 73 degrees, so I figured screw it, it'll be even hotter later, I'll just do my speedwork on the treadmill.
So I slept another hour and a half or so, and it was still 73 degrees out when I finally got up, so I went ahead to the track. It was actually pretty nice. I did 400m, 600m, 800m, 1200m, and then repeated my first three sets in reverse order. I met my time goal on all of my sets so it's nice to see that I'm getting a little faster and not struggling as much to meet my time goals. I ended up covering the three miles of speedwork at about an 8:30/mile pace. I tacked my last mile for today onto the end of my speedwork at my "ideal" marathon pace of 9:00/mile.
I've learned that speedwork is much harder when you don't have the entire group of runners behind (or in my case, in front) of you to motivate and push you. I find I do much better when there are other people to pace myself off of and when I can use the pounding footsteps behind me to fuel myself to run faster. It's also kind of inspiring to see some of the people out there who can run at a5:00/mile pace. I can only dream of being that fast.
Today was basically a pretty laid back day, I spent the remainder of the day doing laundry, and trying to get stuff ready to head out to the lake this coming weekend. Tomorrow I've got to get my stuff packed up, probably do some more laundry (you wouldn't think that just the two of us would make so many dirty clothes, but we do), and try to get everything else done. I've also got to plan when I'm going to get my running in this weekend. I've got a ten-miler scheduled for Saturday and a three mile recovery run for Sunday, but I may bump these both forward by a day just to get them done with.

3 comments:

MNFirefly said...

I am so glad that you got out there and did your speedwork. It's so good to get stuff done when you need to.

Iron Jayhawk said...

Way to go out there and just GIT 'ER DONE!!! :)

Anonymous said...

Great job speed racer. You know some of us wish we could run at a 9 minute/mile pace. I suppose that is the great thing about running you can always strive to improve.