You Better T'work

Recently A and I found ourselves swimming together at the municipal pool.  I showed him how to swim a sequence of laps using the clock, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we do this when we run?”  Why indeed!

Our runs have begun to feel a little rote.  In an effort to add some variety, A started integrating intermittent periods of high speed and reduced effort along predetermined stretches of our route.  But we never actually practiced real interval training before, so we decided to give it a try.

We went to a local track with a low mileage speed set designed for distance runners that I found on the internet.  We had done a little track work in the past (or what I used to think of as “t’work” before twerking came along), but never before followed a specific workout.

The set was written in meters.  My imperial brain had to translate them into revolutions around the track.  With that in mind, this is what we did:

Warm-up (10 minutes)

Light jogging, lunges, front-and-back and side-to-side leg swings, a few sprint strides at 90% effort for 100 meters (approximately 1 long length of the field)

Main Set

600 meters (1.5 x around) sprint

300 meters (0.75 x around) jogging recovery

400 meters (1 x around) sprint

300 meters (0.75 x around) jogging recovery

300 meters (0.75 x around) sprint

300 meters (0.75 x around) jogging recovery

200 meters (0.5 x around) sprint

Cool-down (10 minutes)

Light jogging

Considering the main set was only 1.5 miles, I was pretty dubious about it’s efficacy.  The extreme soreness of my quads disabused me of that notion the next day.  In fact, I was still feeling the lactic acid three days later on our 8-mile trail run.

The next step is to do the main set twice, but it’s been over a week and we have yet to get back to the track.  I like mixing up our routine, but the intervals make me appreciate our distance running so much more and I know I better get back to t’work before long.