Track Workout 3

Last Tuesday was supposed to be my last track workout for a while.  My plan was to taper this week, run the Brimfield Old Settlers Day virtual 5K as a time trail with the goal of breaking 19 minutes to benchmark my year of progress, then revert back to base training mode.

The a couple things happened that made me modify my plans:

• Last Thursday I unceremoniously broke 19 minutes for a 5K during a training run
• A local 3 mile in person race was announced for Labor day

So a new plan emerged.  Train through the virtual 5K and taper for the labor day race.  That gives me a solid 5-6 week race specific build up that should really optimize my performance.

So today I headed to the track for another workout.  With the virtual 5K this week I wanted to put in slightly less work than last week so I settled on a two sets of 400, 400, 800 with 200, 200, 400 recovery.  With 3200 meters of hard effort (vs 5000 m last week) I pushed the pace past the ~6 minute miles that I'd previously been targeting... probably would say I ran these at 3K pace rather then 5K pace.

This workout felt great.  I really had to push to hold pace and I could really feel the burn in my legs.  Even a couple hours later my legs feel better worked than previous workouts.  Really exhilarating stuff.  I'm also surprised how easy these shorter workouts are vs my longer steady state runs.  I guess maybe I'm just geared for these short hard efforts as I don't fear or dread them at all.

Wound up with 5 miles at 6:57 pace including the warmup jog to the track and cooldown home.

Funny enough I also, dropped a 20:10 5K somewhere in the middle of it (which would have been a 5K PR less than a month ago) and a handful of other Strava achievements.