Speaking of comparisons, a guy that beat me by 1 second at the Human Race 8K ran last weekend’s 20K in 1:17:49. That’s eerily similar to my 1:17:57 from last year. So I doubt I could have run 1:17, which is the 35-39 time-standard for the Minnesota Runner of the Year rankings.
Looks like I haven’t mentioned my training in awhile. Sunday was a day off. After work on Monday, I met some of the Saturday morning group that I run with for a tour of Hyland Park (in the daylight). While I enjoyed the run and the company, it’s not an ideal time for me to run, as I got home just as the girls were going to bed. Yesterday was an easy 5 miles.
It seems like I’m always coming on here and typing “easy run” here, “easy run” there. Obviously, that wasn’t the case last Saturday and it wasn’t the case this morning. Pfitz’s plan called for 6 x 600m repeats with a 90 second recovery. Rather than beat myself up over hitting splits on the track, I decided to do these repeats on the trails. Hyland Park has a nice prairie field that includes about a 900-1000m loop. During my warm-up I calculated where I thought 600m would be. Based on my recent 8K time, McMillan says I should be doing 600m repeats between 1:55 and 2:00. Usually I’m on the slow end of the spectrum, plus I was on grass, so I figured if I ran 2:05-2:10, I’d be in the ball park. I timed the first two repeats at 2:20 and 2:22 with a recovery jog around 2:05-2:10. Good enough. I didn’t want to worry about my splits, so I stopped taking the next four. Overall, a nice VO2 max workout – especially considering it was my first one in awhile.
My latest interview is now posted. It has a little different spin than my last couple, but no less interesting.
Today’s quote of the day occurred as the group I ran with on Monday began to exit the park. It was about 75 and sunny so we all had our shirts off. A gal (who probably had no idea the average age of our group was 50-51) was entering on her bike and in a thick Russian (?) accent said;
“Fitness never looked so good.”
6 comments:
Can't wait to get to shirtless running weather.
By the way, do you have a link somewhere to your Pfitz plan? Looking to build something for myself this summer.
Al, Pfitz used to have one of his plans on the runningtimes.com website, but I don't have a link handy.
chad great quote there!
hey...if al happens to catch this, here's the link to the pfitz plan..I plan to give it a go at some point too.
http://www.runningtimes.com/rt/articles/?id=4432
Chad, so you think you can take me in the marathon? :) Actually, with the way you cruised past me on that St. Paul hill at the end of the half, you probably would have cruised by me on the Newtown hills as well.
Thanks Mike.
Nathan, what's up? Nice to see you're blogging. Now I can keep an eye on "the competition."
Well, my blogging will prove to be sporadic, much like my running. Actually, my racing is done for a while now while I focus on the bike. Of course, I'm always saying things like that and yet I still find races to do.
You'll have to get out to Boston next year for the trials.
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