Cold 200's

It was a cold night for Rush Hour at the track last night and the attendance was low...lower than the temps even! I think it was around 30 degrees out with a light wind...yuck!  And probably 15-20 people showed up for the track workout. 

I converted my normal warm-up jog into a walk in order to talk with my friend and our coach Mike.  It was good to catch him up on some of the stuff going on in my life and get his ideas and encouragement.  He is an awesome coach and friend but don't tell him I said so! We've got to keep up our banter of me thinking every workout is impossibly hard and worth negotiating. 

The workout that he prescribed was meant to be fast with little rest due to the cold.  This workout was based on your mile time and you had to keep doing repeats until you hit fatigue.  Fatigue in this case is your interval falling outside 4 seconds of the desired pace.  The distance was 200m repeats with a 15 second recovery between each repeat.  My desired mile pace is 8:00 minutes so my interval was easy to remember 1:00 min.  Given Mike's instructions, I should run from 56 seconds to 64 seconds and once I slowed beyond 64 seconds it was time to shut it down. 

I felt pretty good doing the repeats.  I was generally hitting around 56-58 seconds on each interval but I could tell when I was hitting the end.  I started to feel a stitch coming on around the 8th repeat.  I did two more and pretty much mentally checked out of the workout.  The cold and stresses of life just got in my head and took away my focus.  I know I had more 200's in me so hopefully we'll redo this workout in the future.

I started the second portion of the workout (a mile at 5k pace) and oddly running slower felt more labored than running the fast 200's.  My head was definitely out of the workout and so I packed it in and headed home.  Some days are just more difficult to stay focused on the run.  Even though I didn't finish the workout I left feeling really good about my 200's.  I would like to get them down lower but before the workout I wouldn't have thought I had the fitness to hit the times that I did.