Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Running in Circles....

....is generally what I am not very good at! An A to B training run is good for me - running in a big loop is not good, I get bored! Anyway this has nothing to do with that....last night was my first track session!

I'd never considered hitting the track before, just didn't really see the point - I'm not trying to go fast in the ironman race thats for sure - just survival will be good enough for me! However one of the morning pool people said you could just turn up pay £1 and have a go! Beats doing my normal 1 hour loop around town anyway so hey, why the devil not!

So I legged it home from work and got changed, quick bathrrom stop and scooted out the door - I only live a quarter mile from the track so I ran over there...turned out I had loads of time as it doesn't normally actually get going till 7!

Anyway chatted to some others I know and just warmed up with three or four loops of the track, everyone was dreading the workout coming up - it was going to be 12*300, now that didn't sound very hard to me - its only 3.6k, thats not very far at all, even running fast!

So we started with some drills, strides, bounding etc and then went into the main session - first one I started strong and finished about 3rd of 15 - I was going at about 95% I would estimate which was probably a touch fast, then it was 200m jog recovery. Towards the end there was more walking than jogging to be fair!

And so it continued, I hovered around the 55-58 second mark with the fastest being at 51 seconds for the last one! During the middle sessions I was hovering in around a group behind the 3 or 4 fastest so that I didn't go too fast and blow up! Having never done anything like this before I wasn't sure how long I could go for etc - turns out I was fine - though it was a brutal session - the 1/4mile jog home wasn't the easiest thing on beasted legs! I only mention the bathroom stop earlier as it did cause some discomfort whn going for it, so I'll remember to adjust for that next time!

There were some seriously quick people out there - though I could handle it and probably beat most of them over that distance the speed with which some of the shorter women were travelling was pretty impressive - I only say that as my stride over 300m must be a massive benefit compared to being 5' 2" or whatever they were! I expected to get whooped over 100m as they were pretty speedy off the line and it takes me 25m to get up to any speed!

So the first time on a track since school was a success - I really enjoyed it and certainly got a lot of benefit out of it! 300m still doesn't sound very far but we used to do fitness in rugby training which would be a length of the pitch and back 3 times or whatever the reps were! 300m would be over 3 times that - so a lot more beasting involved! I like the beasting though - when you can keep going even though you are hanging big time! Having said that next weeks schedule is 100,200,300,400,500,600,800,600,500,400,300,200,100, which quite frankly looks obscene! Again I'll have to play it by ear and just see how it comes - I've no idea how fast to run over most of those distances!

According to Garmin my fastest was about 4.19 per mile, which is scary to think that over 300m I can't get under 4 minutes....and to think some people run marathons not far off that pace....gulp!

So the total was just over 6 miles for the evening - much more benefit than an hour plodding the streets! They do some sort of track/long/xc session every night but I think just one track session a week will do.....I shouldn't like anyone to actually think I am a runner (shudder)!

1 comment:

  1. wow..... I'm starting track sessions soon... sounds like its great and good for fitness. great blog!

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