Michigan Workout

Time: 65:05
Distance: 10.56 miles

W/u: 22:16 for 3.01 miles
W/o: 33:51 for 6.34 miles
C/d: 9:00 for 1.21 miles

I hate this workout.

I was really tired this morning and slept in which meant that I missed the cool weather of the morning. Meagan and pops planned an outing to IKEA. Shoot me. So it was on tired legs when I was off to McAlpine to run a tough workout in 87 degree weather. Can you guess how it turned out? I'm already trying to establish excuses.

I felt a little sluggish on the warm up but was attempting to get pumped up for the start of the workout. My goal was to attack the first mile and then try and run relaxed as much as possible. The workout was designed to be run on the track but I thought I could run close to the prescribed pace on the dirt.

Target: Mile in 4:40, 2 miles at 5:10 pace, 1200 in 3:20, 2 miles at 5:10, 800m in 2:10.
Actual:
4:40.90, 5:31, 5:39,
3:44.17, 5:48, 5:47,
2:18.70.

The first mile was spot on and while it felt hard I was confident that this workout was going to be a good one. That was until 400m into the 2 mile section at 5:10 when I looked down and saw that I was running over 5:30 pace. Oops. I would never get back to attempting 5:10 pace as it wasn't going to happen. I almost called it a workout at 3 miles, but decided that it would still be beneficial to hammer a few sections of what was turning out to be a mediocre tempo run. The 1200 felt decent but never really got going. I wanted to commit to hitting 3:40 but it again wasn't happening. The only time I felt really good was on the final 800 when I knew I could leave it all out there. I felt great running 2:18 as it came naturally. The turnover felt natural, the footstrike was strong and the knee lift was right.

I'm not sure what to think about this workout as I was able to run 3 harder efforts within a 6.25 mile run. The point of the workout is to continue to press during the "relaxed" portion of the run but without anybody there to push the pace, I just wasn't going to run 5:10 pace. On the plus side, I know that my fitness is where it needs to be heading in to the final lead up to CVS 5k. I just ran 4:40 and 2:18 on dirt in 87 degree weather by myself. I'm not tapered and this was at the end of a good week of training.