Flying through the night

There's so many things I like about our cross country season. The team camaraderie, the frequent races, and the hills, trails, and dirt. Another thing I like so much is moving our Tuesday evening workouts off the track to the trails around Golden Gate Park & the Presidio. I feel like running hard on a great trail is just mentally so much easier than running hard around the track. So as the road race season takes a break at the end of June, we'll move those Tuesday workouts off the track until Daylight Savings ends. The hills, the turns, and the variable footing has always been my type of running. It builds strength & it builds character.

But at some point toward the end of the season, it comes time to sharpen everything up. Running on the trails, and logging your tempo runs will make you a really strong runner. But for me there's only one way I'll be able to launch that devastating surge or kick during a race - the key are track intervals. It just so happens the shorter days creates the perfect transition to moving our workouts onto the track. I've never like to depend on running workouts at race pace. I like running intervals quite a bit faster. I want that race pace to feel easy for the first half of the race. I ran a cross race last Saturday. It was a solid, but not great race. My one problem, is I just couldn't shift gears.

My tempo and strength work has done wonders for me this season. But no doubt, it's time to hit the track!

Tuesday night we had our West Valley workout under the dim lights on the track - 8 x 600s. The 600 isn't a strength interval, it's about speed. It doesn't have that near sprint feel of a 200 or 400, but it's short enough where you can roll & recover. The idea for this workout was to run the odd intervals at 5k pace, and the even ones at 3k pace (or maybe my 21 year old 3k pace). Between intervals, we'd jog for 200 meters (which including time for the pack to regroup, took about 90 seconds). I ran my first "5k pace" in 1:51 (15:25 pace), then the rest in 1:49 (15:10 pace). I felt well recovered after these. Then the "3k pace" intervals I ran progressively faster - 1:42, 1:42, 1:40, 1:37. I wasn't fully recovered after these, but that's the nature of the workout. I felt great running fast on the track, but left wanting a chance to run a fast pace for at least 800 meters (a half mile).

So despite running a hard workout Tuesday, and having a 30k race (which I planned to run as a long workout), I went back to the track Thursday night on my own to log a shorter version of an interval workout - 4 x 800s. The idea was to run the first at current 5k and knock the pace down on each one. After a long warmup, I started off. The pace felt comfortable - almost slow on the first one. After dodging runners from other clubs who meet at the track, I finished and looked at my watch - 2:27. Really? That felt way slower, but that's good. My next interval I let myself pick up the pace, but kept the pace under control - 2:21. Wow- that was almost too easy. Now for the 3rd, I open it up & run 2:16. I ran that pace in a workout in the Spring, but it felt like a sprint. I was pushing hard on this one, but it actually wasn't that hard! Finally on my last one it was time to really push the pace. I hit the first lap in 67. I almost felt like I fell asleep by not running faster. So i dug in on the 2nd lap. As I came off the last turn, I saw a wall of joggers ahead, but after I desperately yelled TRACK! they scattered out of the way. I hit the line in 2:12 - my fastest 800 interval since college. I bent over to catch my breath, but felt great as I recovered.

Last week was about flying through the night. Next time I need to find the next gear in a race, I should be ready.