Wednesday, January 7, 2009

I feel the need....the need for speed!

Tonight I started a Wednesday night speed session with RUNNYC sponsored by Nike. In the past, I did speed work on Thursday nights with New York Road Runners. Unfortunately, the cost of the classes was adding up do I decided to do without it. Then I came across the RUNNYC group on Facebook. Their speed sessions are free. That's right boys ans girls F-R-E-E that spells free. With my wife's permission, I decided to check it out.

The group meets at Paragon Sports at 6:30 p.m. Before we left, the program coordinators mentioned that in better weather conditions, we would be allowed to try out Nike's newest shoes. I thought that was kind of cool. We left Paragon and ran to the 6th St. track. The coaches mentioned that it was about 1 3/4 miles to the track. Today's workout was 3 x 1600 meters or in layman's terms three, 1 mile repeats. I ran with coach Brad who was leading the 7:30/mile group. He said the main goal for tonight was to try and keep each interval within 10 seconds of each other. I forgot to take the autolap feature off my Garmin so I did not get my exact splits but coach Brad was happy with the workout. It was great to run get off the pavement for a bit and run on the soft surface of the track. Here is a link to the workout: Wedensday Night Speed Session.

The main difference between the RUNNYC and NYRR workouts is that the RUNNYC workouts are traditional track workouts. The NYRR workout are done in Central Park and incorporate hill repeats and tempo runs. Personally, I prefer the traditional track workouts. I can do hill and tempo runs on my own. We'll what next week brings.

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