Friday, April 4, 2008 [10M]

4M decreasing pace. 5:51, 5:47, 5:38, 5:38.

I came back home work this afternoon and headed out to Carlmont High School around 6PM. The track is right around 2 miles away from my place, which is perfect for the pre-workout warm-up. Once I got to the track and started getting ready for my workout I realized to my surprise that the track is only about 390m per lap. I only ran here once before and it was at night so I didn't realize that the track is short. I would estimate that the 5M tempo I ran was about 7-9 seconds slower than I thought per mile, which makes it far less impressive but still not a bad workout I guess. The plan today was to run another decreasing pace 5-miler, starting at 6:00 and dropping 15 seconds per mile. As a sidenote I'll mention that I asked the MIT guys last week why they call this workout the "Kenyan" but I didn't get any compelling arguments so I'll stick to my less creative but accurate name. To make up for the short track I ran the workout in lane 3, which was 402-403m per lap, so a second or two slower per 1600. I got out a bit too fast on the first one, coming through the first lap in 85. I slowed down a bit for the rest of the mile but I was still 1-2 seconds faster than goal pace on each lap. I didn't have to pick it up too much for the second mile and was almost right on. Going into the 3rd mile things started looking bad. Aerobically I wasn't working hard at all but my legs were feeling heavy. I didn't put the effort needed to increase the pace, expecting the transition to 5:30 pace to be easy. I was 3-4 seconds slow on the first lap, brought it down a bit for the next couple of laps but still slower than goal pace. By the end of the 3rd mile my legs were dead and couldn't move any faster. Coming through the half for the 4th mile in 2:50 I decided that adding a 5th mile wasn't worth it. I added a couple of laps around the track and ran a pretty slow cool-down to get back home. This definitely wasn't the workout I was expecting, I thought I would at least be able to get down to 5:15 somewhat easily but I couldn't even break 5:30. I want look into this too much, though, the first workout after coming back from an injury is always tough. Mentally I wasn't into it at all and even though I think I have the aerobic fitness, my legs still need some more miles before I can start running fast again.