Monday, December 7, 2009 (25 minute multi-pace tempo)

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.