Tuesday, February 22, 2011

1000m Repeats

The workout that I dislike the most is mile repeats.  Today's workout is my second least favorite.  1000m or 1 kilometer repeats.  That's 2 and a half laps around a track.  It's about .6 miles.

The goal was to run at 10k pace.  I don't have a frame of reference since I haven't run one in 5 years.  In this case, coach told us to use our 5k pace, double it and add 1 minute.  I figure that's around 23 minutes, so 46 plus 1 equals 47 minutes.  Our chart didn't have 10k times, so my partner and I guessed it would be around 4:40-4:45 and anything under that is good.  Now that I can look it up online using a pace calculator, I can see that it is 4:42.

The workout was 2 sets of 4 repetitions.  The first one was 10k pace and then 3-4 seconds faster each one.  Take a 1 minute rest between reps and 3 minutes between the 2 sets.  At the beginning of the second set, start over at 10k goal pace again and work our way down again.

That didn't work out at all.  We ran the first one in 4:21.  Way too fast.  Followed that up with 4:25, 4:23, and 4:23.  I don't remember the second set except for the last one.  Here's what happened on the second set, because I deviated from the workout.  My partner and I tried to keep up with the pack in front of us to begin the next set of 4 x 1000.  They were only running between 5-10 seconds faster than us, but we were already running too fast.  That did me in.  On the second 1000, I started feeling numb in my feet and a little dizzy, so I stopped with 300 to go and did a walk and jog around the track to get straight.  I then did my third and forth by myself.  Third one was slow and the forth one I ran the 1000 at 4:30, but I also kept running for another lap to make up the difference of what I cut short on the second rep.  It probably didn't help my workout, but it helped my ego at the end of the workout, so I didn't feel like I cheated.

I don't like 1000's.  Everyone has theirs.  I like running 400's.  Most people hate them.

3 comments:

Andrew Opala said...

awesome man! (As I said on dailymile)

The Green Girl said...

That would've really sucked if I was saying goodbye to running. ::shudders at the very thought::

I don't think I'm even capable of a mile repeat. That's a long way to push yourself - nice job pushing through!

Tri-James said...

You are correct. The longer intervals are much harder.

I use a rule of thumb that the last interval should be no slower than the first interval. If you can't hold pace then you are going too fast and your form will suffer - risking injury.