Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Ladder Workout

I don’t normally blog about my workout times, mostly because that’s just so personal. My super-speediest pace might be your slow day…or maybe a bad workout to me would be the workout of your dreams.  And really, unless you’re ultra-elite, it doesn’t matter - there will always be faster and slower runners out there to make you feel inadequate or awesome. (And if you are ulra-elite, Oh hey! Thanks for reading, leave a comment!)

Now that I’ve said all that…here I go telling you about my workout from last night. It was kind of a special occasion – my first track workout in months! And it actually went ok. 

Keep in mind that recently I have been running about every other day, plus pooling like crazy…so I’m not totally starting from square 1. Through the first half I definitely felt rusty in the faster-running-department, but we followed Coach George’s Start Slow Finish Fast philosophy and had a decent workout!

This is a ladder workout – starting and ending with 400m (1 lap), and building up to a 1600m (1 mile/4 laps). Between each repeat, we ran ½ of that repeat for recovery – i.e. after the 400m, we jogged 200m. 

I forgot my watch (see what happens when you don’t workout for months!), so the times below are as I remember them…but if you were there and remember what we ran, let me know (I’m looking at you, Beth)!

This workout totals to 4 miles of fast running, plus 2 miles of recovery running. It may look like a lot, but really once you get to the top (the 1600m), it’s all downhill from there. The second 1200m always kills me…but after that I’m home free!

Warm up: 5 minutes. (I normally run 10-20 minutes for my warm up, but I got to the track late and didn’t want to miss starting with the group.)
 
400m – 1:47, 200m recovery
800m – 3:26, 400m recovery
1200m – 5:05, 600m recovery
1600m – 6:46, 800m recovery
1200m – 4:45, 600m recovery
800m – 3:08, 400m recovery
400m – 1:33

Cool down 15 minutes.

I’m calling my total mileage for the night 7.5 – my longest run to date! Woot woot!

After the workout a few of my teammates and I hit up IHOP’s free pancake day. The wait was long…but totally worth it. I am all about post-run pancakes!