At band practice

The days of attending the TNT track workouts have come and gone. As the daylight hours lesson, so do my hours of available run time. The football practices have been ending on time, which means that I would be forced to leave the track workout even earlier than I was already cuting out. I finally decided that it was more hastle than it was worth. So…

Tuesday evening, I laced up my shoes and left for my run right from YaYa’s football practice. Instead of cutting across the grass, I took the long way to the track by running around the block first. I had a nice round 1 mile warm up completed by the time I arrived.

The workout seemed simple enough: 2 x 1600s, 2 x 800s, 2 x 400s. The problem was that I wasn’t quite sure of the paces. I knew that “marathon” was noted for the first set, but I wasn’t sure if it was marathon pace or half marathon pace. I decided to just run hard and see what happened.

Right off, I knew that I was going out too fast but managed to hold on to the pace. At one point the high school band, which had been practicing their marching drills on the football field, lined up in half a dozen straight lines on the track, forced me to run wide to the outside lane to pass them. I tried to hide my frustration. It was their school after all. And when I heard the stampeded behind me, I picked it up a little more to insure that I wasn’t passed. That 1600, although faster than intended, did the trick in getting my workout moving. I was glad that the band members were only doing 1 lap. It took a while for all of the members to finish up.

I was nearly finished with my recovery lap when the last one finally finished. It was odd to have so many eyes pointed in my direction even if they weren’t paying attention to me. They practiced moving together at a precise tempo, while I tried to run each interval at a steady pace. I didn’t realize that I was keying off of them until they switched to a slower tempo. By the recover between 800s, I could answer their leader’s queries on how many counts forward and back.

I was pretty pleased with myself for pushing hard to the bitter end. Although I wasn’t sure of the target paces, I did follow a pattern of increasing the speed with each shorter interval.

Interval / Time (Pace)
1600 / 7:42 (7:42 / M)
1600 / 7:51 (7:51 / M)
800 / 3:42 (7:24 / M)
800 / 3:44 (7:28 / M)
400 / 1:42 (6:48 / M)
400 / 1:40 (6:40 / M)

It wasn’t until later that I realized the paces that I was supposed to run.

• 2 x 1600 @ marathon pace
• 2 x 800 @ half marathon pace w/ 2 minute recovery
• 2 x 400 @ 10k pace w/ 2 minute recovery

*sheepish grin*