Monday, April 21, 2008

Sara Hall New York Times Inspired Run

Thursday, April 17th, the New York Times ran an article on Sara Hall regarding her training regimen. A friend and co-worker sent me the article interoffice and I got inspired to do some speed work. Check out the link, there is short video that goes along with the article that I didn't even know was available until I did a search to link this up.

My workout that afternoon consisted of:

2 mile warmup
3 miles on the track
1.5 mile cooldown

The 3 miles was broken down into 4 sets of 440 yds with 220 yds recovery; 4 sets of 220 yds with 440 yds recovery.

The times were as follows:
440's: 1:19, 1:17, 1:15, 1:17
220's: 35, 35, 36, 34

Of note...
If I could put all the 440s together, I would run a 5:08 mile. If I could put all the 220s together and continue on the pace through a mile, it would be a 4:40 mile.

Especially when I was running the 220s, I could feel the extra fat hanging and being slung around at my abs, glutes and hamstrings. I need to work a little more on my arm strength, particularly my biceps. I felt my arms starting to tighten up towards the end of my workout.

To say the least, I was sore the next 2 days from my abs down. I also felt very weak on Friday and still sluggish on Saturday.

*** Only a few days to my 5K. ***

Yesterday (Sunday), I ran up to Lake Ivanhoe (the central portion and the eastern portion of the lake), did 2 laps and then ran back. I gmap'd the run and it was 7 miles. I wanted to do 8 miles for my workout, but 7 was good. I didn't realize it was a mile to the lake, because I thought I was going to do 3 laps of Lake Ivanhoe, but they are 2.5 miles each lap. I would have done 9.5 and that would have been too much. I wanted to keep an average pace of 8:30 per mile for the entire run. I chose not to warmup and started out a little slow. I was definitely on pace much of the run. I may have gone a little faster on miles 4 and 5. I started feeling tired on mile 6 and 7 and had to concentrate on pumping my arms to keep pace. I had to stop twice for traffic stops/crossing Colonial Drive, so that may have altered my time slightly. How much I'm not sure. I ran the 7 miles in 61 minutes. That is a pace of 8:43. Exactly 1:30 behind pace. I don't think I stopped at the lights that long. Maybe a combined total of 30 seconds. Not bad considering I had no mile markers to calculate my pace as I ran. Using the treadmill is definitely good for judging your pace.

Speaking of pace, I am going to add a couple links to some tools I used. One is the Gmap Pedometer, which allows you to map out a course and it tells you how far you have run. The closer you zoom in, the more accurate it is. The second tool is a pace calculator. You can put your mileage and time into the program and it will calculate your average pace. You can put any 2 of the items into the program and it will give you the third.

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