I had a satisfying track workout today. Woke up to 52 degrees and sunny at 6:40 am. Only problem...30 mph gusts of wind outside. Well, at least going to the fairview track meant I would have a tail wind for half the time. A track may actually be the best place to do an interval session on a windy day. It would be totally demoralizing to try to do a mile repeat into a head wind. My buddy Eric Wynn is staying with us and I convinced him to join me for the morning o' fun in the wind around in circles, which was nice, because everyone else had bailed for the morning so I would have been solo. I decided to do a workout like this: 400, 800, 1200, 1600, 1200, 800, 400, and then some 200's. Here are my splits for those: 75, 2:38 (5:16/mile), 4:04 (5:24/mile), 5:30, 4:12 (5:33), 2:39, 71, 29, 30. I ended up only feeling like doing 2 x 200 at the end: Took it out conservatively on the first two intervals and then tried to make sure I stayed sub 5:30 pace on the 1200's and mile. It was TOUGH on those middle sets. The 4th lap of the mile after 1200 meters I about got blown off the track. But I still managed a 5:30 on that mile, which feels good. Without the wind I think it would have been a 5:20 effort or so. The next 1200 set was the toughest of them. It was pretty stiff wind on that one, plus that is probably the hardest set of the workout physically. I hit the last 800 on target and felt pretty strong with a 71 second quarter to finish up. Then a couple 200's for good measure and fun sprinting at sub 4 min. pace. It's kind of odd how 29 or 30 seconds is about what I run for 200's if I'm fresh or if I just finished a workout. Although the mile and second 1200 repeat were tougher to hold that pace than I would like them to be, I feel ok about where I'm at. Especially with how windy it was. But I also feel like in order to be confident in a sub 17 minute 5K I'm going to need to get 4 or 5 mile repeats down to around 5:20 pace. We'll see I guess. Fortunately my ankle (which has been a slight annoyance the last week or so) was fully warmed up by the time we got to the mile and didn't bother me at all after that. It was just slightly noticeable before that. So that was a good thing for sure. After totally flat fast stuff today, I'm looking forward again to going back to all out vertical on green on Thursday where sub 15 min miles feel like a huge accomplishment to me. For the morning: 10 miles - 1:18 - 7:49 avg - virtually 0 vertical.
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