Wednesday Morning Surprise

Not a groundbreaking, earth shattering, life changing kind of surprise, but a pleasant one, none the less. (For me any way) Last night the running club had it's weekly speed workout at the track. As I got out of bed this morning around 5:15 to do some recovery walking on the treadmill (please see all the posts about how I can't run everyday) a funny thing occurred to me: I wasn't sore. I wasn't even tight. My shin, which has been bothering me slightly the past couple weeks, was fine. It wasn't that I didn't run hard last night. I'd consider 6 X 800 meter repeats to be running pretty hard. But I just felt good this morning. This makes me start thinking about adding another day of running to the week. I could fit something in on Thursdays. Maybe some tempo work. Maybe just on the treadmill to keep the impact down. Not this week, with a race on Sunday. But maybe next week.

As for the track workout, we ended up running at the high school instead of the middle school due to a soccer game. The only time I've been on that track is to finish a 5K which is held in the spring. We began with a 1.5 mile warm-up as everyone slowly found their way to the high school. Then it was a set of Yasso 800's. Which is a fancy name for 800 meter repeats, the times for which are determined by your desired marathon finish time. Here's an example: Mr. Pythagoras would like to finish the Columbus Marathon in a time of 3 hours and 45 minutes. He would then go to a track and run 800 meter repeats at a time of 3 minutes and 45 seconds per 800. Here's how that all worked out:

800 m - 3:10
400 m rest
800 m - 3:10
400 m rest
800 m 3:19
400 m rest
800 m - 3:18
400 m rest
800 m - 3:18
400 m rest
800 m - 3:15

As you can see, I wasn't very good at staying on my goal pace. Just by averaging the times out in my head, they are predicting a finish time somewhere around 3 hours and 15 minutes. That would be precisely 1 hour faster than my current PR. Not that that's unrealistic. It's just not a realistic expectation for this year. I think I'm very capable of cutting off at least 15 minutes, if not a little more. There are many variables in the marathon: training, tapering, health on the day of the race, weather, diet, etc... I have two months to do as much as I can to prepare the things I have control over. So far, I think I'm doing fairly well.

Mr. P
(Pain free as of 1:00PM 8/13/08)