Speedwork

Antonio and I headed over to Riverbank this morning to get some speedwork in. The 3 mile warmup to get there felt tough, as most early morning runs do for me, and I was regretting my decision to stick a track workout in the schedule. Running is fun. Running painfully fast on the track, not so much. Just arriving at Riverbank and seeing the track made me nervous, but we lined up for our first lap and took off. Part of the reason for today was to get a feel for pace. I’m racing a mile on Tuesday and would love to drop under 5. So, I planned 6 x 400 meters today at 75 seconds with a lap of rest in between each. Halfway around the first one, I realized I had forgotten to change the display on my Garmin and had no idea how fast (slow) we were going. It ended up being 1:21. Shit. 6 seconds off pace and that was tough. Jogged a lap and then off again, harder. 1:17. Then 1:18. The recovery jog got slower, but the fourth lap we hit 1:16. I thought I was going to puke. “You know what’s sad?” I asked. “What?” “We’re not even running these quarter miles as fast as Ryan Hall ran the whole marathon up in Boston.” Antonio just shook his head. (I looked it up when I got home and Hall’s 2:08:41 breaks down to 1:14 quarter miles.) Lap 5 hurt, and 1:16 again. We stopped for water and got ready for the last one. I knew I’d be pissed off all day if I couldn’t hit at least one lap at my target pace so I ran as hard as I could. I was sure I had it. But no. I looked down at my watch to see another 1:16. Well, at least they were consistent. We’ll see how Tuesday goes, but it’s looking like sub-5 is going to elude me once again.