National Running Day

Due to work conflicts, I had to reschedule my dentist appointment that would have prevented me from going back to Nike Speed tonight. Now that I didn't have my appointment, I thought it would be great to celebrate National Running Day by doing some speedwork. The last time I did speedwork was 6 weeks ago. I wanted to give myself a full month after my marathon before doing speedwork again.

Earlier in the day, Coach Kate posted the workout on the RUN NYC Facebook page, between 4 and 8 600m with a 200m recovery in between, with optional 2x200 at the end. I thought "good lord, how the hell I'm going do this?" Fortunately, the weather gods did not want us to go to the track tonight. When I got off the subway at Union Square, it was raining pretty steadily. My immediate reaction was to get back on the subway and go home but something was pulling me towards Paragon. I said "if I can run 26.2 in the rain, I can do some speedwork." And with that I went downstairs, checked my bag, and started to stretch. It was great to see all the pacers, especially Brad who was back after recovering from his 2:41:xx at the London Marathon. Anyway, Kate announced that instead of going to the the track we'd be doing a Fartlek run on the West Side Highway.

On to the workout... the goal was to run five 3 minute "pickups" with a 2 minute recovery in between. After a good warmup we began the workout. I was able to keep up for the first pickup but the started to struggle. My legs felt fine, the problem was with my breathing. Brad told me that it was going to feel hard since my body needed time to reacclimate itself to speedwork. I found myself in an unusual spot, I couldn't keep up with the group. A workout that once came easy to me was all of a sudden difficult. Brad sensed this and fell back to keep me company. He told me to relax, concentrate on my form, forget about trying to keep up with the group, and run my own pace. What he also did was keep me honest by making sure I didn't throw in the towel. On the way back to Paragon, other runners and pacers asked me how my workout was, I answered with one word "HARD." It's going to take me a few weeks to get used to speedwork again but it's well worth the wait.

Map, splits, and other stuff can be found here: Wednesday Night Speed Session.