Tuesday, April 8, 2008 [10M]

Anaerobic Threshold run. I decided to give one of Coach Taylor's new workouts a try since it seemed to fit what I'm doing right now. The goal of the workout is to run 40 seconds slower than mile PR for as long as you can but for my first one I wanted to be somewhat more conservative and was shooting to run 5:10-5:20 pace. I was back home from work and on my way to Carlmont High School by 7PM. I got pretty much right into it, starting out with a 78 for the first lap and continuing with 80s and 81s. It was windy again so I was content with running 5:20s. I didn't manage to hold on to that pace for too long, though, and after coming through the half in 2:45 with my legs feeling like trash I decided to stop after the second mile, which I finished in 5:31. I jogged a couple of laps and decided to add on 4 quarters to the workout. I know it doesn't make that much sense as a workout but I felt that 2 miles on the track would hardly qualify as a workout and wanted to put in something more. My legs were pretty tired and I wasn't putting that much effort into the quarters, just getting out reasonably fast and maintaining the pace. I ran 68, 70, 69 and 72, which is far from spectacular but not a complete loss cause given the circumstances. I jogged a few more laps on the infield afterwards and took the long route home to add on some slow mileage. After running another horrible workout I'm starting to wonder I would have been better off sticking to base mileage for another week or two before starting any hard efforts. It feels a bit strange, though, that I can comfortably clip 6:20s on long runs but I can't run a minute faster for more than two miles. It's actually sad if you consider that a couple of months ago I averaged 5:25s for a half marathon. I was planning to run another workout this week but I think I'll wait to see how I feel by the end of the week and play things by ear.