Grrrr, Lamposts...

Last night was my first speed workout of the season.

I have been running with the advanced group for the most part, but yesterday I got an email that said if you don't run a 9 minute mile or below that you should run with the intermediate group for the practice. I was confused (as was everyone else). Did he mean like a 9 minute mile for a 10k? or for your marathon pace? Most people agreed that it must have been marathon pace and decided to run with the intermediate group.

We were supposed to do a 5 mile loop with speed intervals in between. The first part of the loop (from East 97th up to 102nd and across the park then down to West 96th) consisted of a nice, easy warmup. When we got to 96th we had to run at Effort Level 4 for 8 lamposts on our left.Effort Level 4 was defined as 85% of your effort...not quite a sprint, but right before a sprint. If you were to talk to your neighbor you would only be able to get out one or two words before you had to stop and wheeze for a breath. After the 8 lamposts, we had 4 lamposts of recovery. Recovery was supposed to get us back to normal breath control. The coach emphasized that if we had to walk to do this then we should. The recovery was just as important as the speedwork. We repeated these cycles all the way around the park and back up to East 97th.

I had no idea there were so many lamposts in Central Park! (They range from 2-4 per short block...most times two. BTW short blocks are 1/5 of a mile). I kept thinking, "Wow. My time is going to be really fast." I mean, I was really pushing the speedwork. Sometimes I did have to walk on the recovery just to get a drink. I was pretty disappointed when I logged a 46:04. (That's a 9:12 mile). But my mentor, Gina, made a good point. Sure we were running fast on the Effort 4's, but when we recovered we were running much much slower than we usually do.

The whole purpose of the workout was to generate faster turnover in our normal runs.

As painful as it was, it did feel good to be passing people up on the path during the speedwork. AND it felt really cool to be kicking a lot higher in the back. I wish I could keep that up during my normal runs.