Wednesday, after a day off on Tuesday spent driving to and from Lufkin (more on that later), it was time for speedwork again, 6-8 x 800m on the track. My legs were a little stiff from all the driving and sitting around, but they loosened up enough on the warmup and drills. Kenny and Bernard were in charge of the workout today. There were three or maybe four groups using the track this morning, so it was pretty crowded. I think everyone was pretty good about track etiquette, though, so we didn't have any real problems.
Kenny was explaining the art and science of 800's to some of the new people, but Amy, Jessica and I decided to just get started. We've done this workout before. Kenny said 5 or 6 x 800m would be enough, but Amy and I had done 7x800m last time out, and figured we needed to do at least that many today, as long as we felt pretty good towards the end. I led the first repeat, just settling into the pace of the day. I planned to shoot for a baseline of 3:30/800m, and hope to gently pick up the pace throughout so that I could end up with an average pace around my PR for this workout, which would be 3:24/800m.
We did some darting in and out of traffic as we negotiated our 800's, but it didn't cause us to lose any time. By the third repeat, we had settled into a routine of Amy or Jessica leading the first lap of each 800, and then I'd pull away just a bit on the second half of the repeat for a slightly faster finish. Amy wanted to end up with 3:30/800m, and that way we all got the pace help we needed. It worked out great. Jessica had to go after 5 or 6 repeats, and Amy and I finished up the last 3. I did the last one totally on my own after Amy told me to do so. She knocked out her 7th repeat on her own as well.
I ended up with a PR set of 800's, and almost nailed my PB 800m repeat on the last repeat. It felt comfortably difficult, if that makes any sense. I was working hard, but not totally gasping at the end of any repeat except the last one. Good stuff.
Splits: 3:28, 3:30, 3:26, 3:26, 3:25, 3:22, 3:09. 3:24/800M for 7x800m (6:50/mile average pace). As usual, the suggested "10K pace" for 800's was widely ignored by us. :-)
Nice and easy cooldown running with Colleen, Amy and Jennifer, and we were done. I stayed around for the full stretching routine and that was a necessary thing. 7.24 miles for the day.
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3 comments:
if those were Yasso 800s, you're looking at a 3:30...
We only get 2:00 rest between 800's, too, but I've not seen a straight correlation between my Yassos and marathon finish times...yet. I'm still happy with the workout, though.
I freely admit that my 10K PR doesn't match up with my other races. I have some sort of mental hangup about that distance, but I'm working on it. It's a little tough to improve on 10K when I usually only run two of them a year. Perhaps I need to run them a little more frequently? :-)
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