50F, light rain. VO2 + a bit of MP. 20 min strength work. Since we now have daylight at 5 AM, I decided to drive down to the H.S. track. I ran around that neighborhood a bit to warm up, then finished the warm up on the track with 5 x 50m strides and about 150m jog between. After the warm-up: 5 x 400m, target pace 7:45, with 200m recovery b/t. Between the variability of me maybe not hitting the lap button right on the mark and the Garmin's natural error of margin, I got some inconsistent numbers. But all the splits were in the neighborhood of my target... pace (time): 7:52 (1:57), 7:35 (1:59), 7:45 (1:59), 7:49 (1:59), last-one-fast-one 7:28 (1:52). After my last recovery jog, I ran 800m at MP for psychological benefit. IE- "This feels easy!" On my way home in the car, I had the idea to check the elevation gain of the Parkway (aka Leg Builder Hill) on my Garmin. It's about 450 feet, spread over 2 miles, with the steepest part at the final .7 miles. I was thinking today about my warmups and how slow they are. And I was thinking about something a friend told me, which makes me wonder if I should let the warmup be even slower. This friend has repeatedly been to a running camp called Camp Marafiki in Santa Fe. She is a "local elite" in Oklahoma. According to her, the Kenyan coaches at this camp, whose "easy" pace is probably 7:00 or 7:30, do their first few minutes warmup at -- are you sitting down? -- around 12:00. In contemplating this oddity, I wondered what it would be like to really go slower than I want to and slower than I can in the first mile of my warmup. Slower than slow warmup -- it's hard to do! I had to really think about it and not space out. Guess what the hardest part of my workout was? The strides. That transition from easy to hard. But they were mercifully short, and the whole warmup procedure seemed to go well, because the 400s were not devastatingly, I-hate-running hard. I haven't done 400s for years and years, so the shortness of the reps was nice too. That's my last really intense workout, and I will focus on MP & strides for the remainder of the taper.
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