am: 15 min jog
pm:
25 minutes on the track, broken down into 5 five-minute periods, each progressively faster. Carl (coach of the club) suggested running these as:
1st minute: 7:30 pace
2nd minute: 6:40 pace
3rd minute: 5:50 pace
4th minute: 5:20 pace
5th minute: 5:00 pace
Which is actually pretty reasonable when you go through it five times. I ran with Chris, Dave, and Luke (sorry, readers of this blog are unlikely to know who I'm talking about any more), and felt controlled. I was tired by the end, and glad we were only doing five. Originally I thought the workout sounded easy, but the continuous movement with faster stuff thrown in can be tiring, and right now it seems my speed is good, and I'm very relaxed and don't breathe hard even at faster speeds, but my VO2 max type fitness is zero, and my threshold-running fitness is low. Short efforts are fine and I recover from them quickly. I could probably run a decent mile. But sustained fast stuff is going to take some time to come back to me.
I'm not sure if we hit the advertised paces or not, but regardless it felt like decent work. Chris is actually a 15:30 or so guy who was running easy today.
As we were warming down and leaving, a tall runner with a fast but somewhat strange-looking stride was running some short repeats. Turns out it was Michael Coe. Then the checkout guy at Safeway asked me if I still ran (I was wearing KB's Caltech XC sweatshirt). I said yes, and got a long story about how the guy ran a 5:20 mile as a sophomore and regretted that he played baseball and so never got to go faster, even though he definitely could have because he once almost beat out an infield grounder. Next time I start talking about things I used to be able to do in running, please smack me. Preferably with something more massive than just your hand.
Monday, December 7, 2009 (25 minute multi-pace tempo)
December 4, 5, 6 2009
Friday Dec. 4
off
Saturday Dec. 5
60 easy
Sunday Dec. 6
60 easy
Weekly Summary: 365 minutes, one track workout, one tempo (on the track)
Getting back to working out feels good. Not physically. Physically it felt decent, but it was obvious I'm unfit. But I'm glad to be back running faster again, especially with other people running at the same level.
Thursday, December 3, 2009 (6400m tempo 22:53)
I was on my own, since everyone else in the club started well before the advertised 6pm start time. There were some guys going significantly faster than me and some going significantly slower, so it probably didn't matter.
I tried to keep myself controlled for this tempo, but even at a very moderate pace, that felt almost like a dawdle at times, I wound up exerting myself pretty fully. My heart rate was somewhere around 190, and I felt pretty tired just running in the low 5:40's. Still, I kept the pace pretty steady (fastest 5:41 first mile, slowest 5:45 second mile) and stayed focused, so the speed will have to come back with time.
If I do another tempo next week, I'll make it a little slower and longer to try to stay below threshold, which I probably crossed today.
November 29 - Dec 2, 2009
Sunday, November 29 (52 minutes in the hills, 30 minute jog)
Went up Strawberry Canyon again with Dennis. I moved out a bit halfway through to get back in time for tutoring, and this felt good. Jogged a little later in the day because 52 minutes felt short.
Monday, November 30 (8 x 600)
Last week I ran into some guys working out on the track, and when they finished I introduced myself and asked what they were training for. They said they were a USATF club here in Berkeley, that they were at the end of a cross country season, and invited me to come train with them. Today was the first day of that.
I ran 8x600 with Luke, a guy who ran one year in high school, was injured for most of it, and came back at the very end to run a 4:27 mile. Holy crap. Then he became a cyclist for a few years, and recently went back to running when the cycling club got suspended. We ran together well today, but I have the feeling that when he gets in shape he'll be way ahead of me. He's planning on trying to walk onto the Cal team next year.
I didn't time the repeats because it was my first track work in a long time. I think the pace was roughly 73's. The rest was absurdly long though. We took a 400 jog between repeats. This was fine for a first workout that simply sends a wake-up call to my body, "Hey, you might want to get ready. I'm going to ask you to pretend a moderately-paced predator with a several minute attention span is chasing me about once a week from here on out for a while now. It'd be nice if you got yourself ready for that."
Tuesday, December 1 (75 minutes)
Jogging on the infield, since the baseball field is closed. Felt a little sore.
Wednesday, December 2 (60 minutes)
Infield. Feeling better than yesterday. Not quite so cold, either. My feet were on the verge of going numb before, but they were okay today.