Thursday, January 27, 2011

ahhhh--"speed" on the run!

So awoke this morning with another 14 inches on the ground--that's beyond the 6 that fell Wednesday morning--this me and my new snowblower subsequently and dutifully cleared. 14 inches is a whole nother thing than 6 inches (at least that's what she said). I spent 3+ hours from 5:45 am making the driveway safe for all things mobile christofferson. it didn't help that it was heavy snow, but my snowblower is definitely making the christofferson's the envy of the hood. Best thing I ever bought--cept maybe my toaster with the glass sidewalls--no more burnt toast....

Anyways, while not the same as 3 hours of shoveling, wrestling a 90 pound snowblower, cleaning off the cars, and all the shoveling on the perimeter was a pretty solid effort. No time to rest as i promptly got in a 1 hour easy spin on the bike and then my first speed workout run-wise of the year--on the tready. My Vdot (from my 5k) dictated that I set my 400 pace at 9 mph (6:40/mile) so i banged out 8X400@1:40. this proved to be easier than i would have expected and definitely easier than past early season efforts. makes me think (well--I'm convinced) that I'm faster than a 22:57 5k guy right now. The first 6 400s my HR would rise up to 162 and then tail off rapidly. Numbers 7 and 8 finally begain to stress my body as i felt it RPE wise and my HR rose to 165 and 167 respectively on the last two. Still--well below my ATHR of 172 so I know this was a relatively easy first speed session.

Which is perfect! I want to work up to 3+ miles of speed work and feel like only the last .5-.75 miles is really tough. Eventually, I hope to nail 12X400@90 sec and feel good. Today was a good first start in that direction. I've run now for something like 35 days in a row and I'm about to transistion into a 6/5/6/5 runs/week progression which will allow me to run longer and harder (as the case may be) in my workouts. My experiment with high frequency (running 40 days in a row) seems to be a success as even though my legs are always pretty sore, I still seem to get good quality runs in once I warm-up.

I finished off with a form-specific 1500 drill swim and then headed up to NYC for a bunch of meetings. Tomorrow will be a very easy day--probably just 1 hour. I'll hammer Sat/Sun and then enjoy a "recovery" week next week....

more on that soon

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