The track near my house is not lit so I thought a workout there was going to be difficult. Last night I decided to swing by the track and see what was doing, if it didn’t look good I’d continue on for a hill workout. Luckily the street and school lights provide just enough illumination so you can see what your doing. Only the back corner was a little sketchy but after a couple times around it was fine.

I took the long way there so my warm-up was nearly 4 miles. I felt light and bouncy and was excited to get to work. My track workouts are sporadic at best so I‘m always a little out of sorts, unsure of pacing and what workout to do. For no reason at all I decided to do a pyramid type workout starting at 400m building to 1600m and then coming back down with 400 recoveries between each interval. Instead of aiming for a goal pace I decided to just do what felt natural.

400 – 1:32 slooow, maybe I hadn’t realized I was on the track or something. I chalked it up as a warm-up lap.

800-2:53 that was in the range that I expected. I was pushing but not to hard.

1200 – 4:22. Right on track, I was in the groove and the 400 recovery after this interval felt just right.

1600- 5:47 Faster than expected and I felt like I had held back slightly in the last two laps. My recovery lap was slow at 2:18 but not horribly slow and surprisingly I wasn’t dreading the way back down.

1200-4:18 Faster than the first.

800-2:50 keeping up the trend.

400-1:17- I let it loose on the final lap, close to all out.

Thinking back I’d say this was the best track workout I’ve had to date. It might not necessarily be the fastest but I beat my expectations and I felt strong the whole way through. The interval portions totaled 6400m so that definitely makes it the largest volume I’ve done in one workout and it didn’t feel that way. I’m definitely going to stick to this workout my next time out.

I felt energized on the 1.5 miles back to my house. 11.7 miles in 1:24

This morning was a very easy loop around CH. The sky was clear and I caught the beginning of a beautiful sunrise. Cold, damp and misty, I felt like I was in the northwest. Ryan Adams was the perfect musical backdrop for the run. 6 miles in 50 minutes.