A Combination Plate

Did I mention how tired I was of running?

As planned, I hit the track this morning. Warmed up with T. as he biked to school and continued my jog to Franklin Field. I couldn’t decide on a distance so I worked in a bunch of different distance. “Ladder reps” in the running patois. This means repeats of 400, 800, 1200 & 1600 meters up the ladder, and then 1600, 1200, 800 & 400 meters back down the ladder. The shorter ones are a bit faster than the longer ones, and there are 400 meter recovery laps between each of them.

I’ll just give you the numbers. Reps were hit in 1:17, 2:39; 4:06; 5:28; 5:29; 4:04; 2:40 & 1:15. The most important of these times are the last two – the 2:40 was the only rep I hit slower than target (by one second) and the last 1:15 was two seconds faster than target. So I had a good day.

When I’m on the track and hitting my target times I always learn a lot. Little things like today where several times I got that feeling that I was just on a threshold of oxygen debt that I could maintain before going into serious huffing and puffing. I found I could hold that until I came around the last turn and then really hammer it to where I was dying as I finished. Or to discover I had faster gears left when I went back down the ladder to the last reps, which I had to do at a faster speed. And then, when the last rep came with less effort and less dying than it should have, the inevitable question of how much lower could I have set the target times.

But those questions, and a lot of others, will have to wait until some other day, as this is the last really hard track workout probably of the year. There will be some others in the next few weeks, but they will be more to “rev the engine” than they will be to push it to the edge. My achilles tendons are also more sore than I’d like them to be, but after this week I’m not really saving them for anything. One last long run on the weekend and then I can wind things down.

Did I say I was looking forward to this?