Yesterday marked the first workout of the 9-week half marathon training program leading up to PDR. My legs were beat up from a work picnic on Monday that featured a half hour of Ultimate Frisbee. That short bout of sprinting and stopping, with a lot quick turns was enough to make everything ache. I thought about bagging the workout last night because of it but that would be no way to get the ball rolling on training. I was tight on the 2 mile warmup to the track but once I started my workout I felt fine and didn’t think about it.

There is a ton of interval work in the training program, all different lengths and all different speeds. The mess of numbers and abbreviations on the calendar makes my heads spin and requires me to memorize everything before I head out. This type of training is completely opposite from the low heart rate stuff I wrote about a while back but I am going to give it a shot.

Last night called for “4 x 1 mile PI (400), 6 x 200 SI (100)”. That means 4 miles at half marathon pace with 400 recovery and 6 x 200 at 10K pace with 100 recovery. I just realized that I made a mistake last night and only ran 800’s at half marathon pace (How did I miss that?) half the required distance. I guess I’ll consider that easing into the program. Half marathon pace is roughly 6:18 so I was aiming for 3:05-3:10 for the 800s, not too bad. I just tried to run hard on the 200s and hopefully run around 43 seconds.

800s - 3:07(1:55), 3:08(1:55), 3:08 (1:56), 3:04(2:04)

200s – 41(40), 41(21), 40(47), 43(44), 45(40), 41(40)

I thought I knew how to split 200s on the track but I made a mistake on one of the recoveries (21). I thought the straight-aways were 100 and the turns were 100 but obviously not so I corrected the next time around.

Overall the workout wasn’t that hard and it really shouldn’t have been based on the slower 800s. Of course, had I run the proper 4x1 mile, things would have been much more difficult and I am aggravated that I made that mistake. I’ll just have to study a little more next time.