Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Slow Torture Workout - 10+ miles

I came to the workout a little dreary. My legs had been sore all week since the Heights 5k race and my legs felt a tiny bit better today...not much better. Lucky for me Sean had devised this slow torture workout for us. Even more lucky was the fact that the humidity was of the extreme variety. Oh well, I grabbed my lunch pail and went to work.

We warmed up for 2 miles and then went over to line up. Well, what do you know? We run into a who's who list of Houston runners doing workouts as well. We meet up with Joe Flores, Jose Lara, Vaughn Gibbs, and JP Machemehl. We chatted a bit and then went our separate ways. My workout was a killer. Here it was:

1 Mile5:10
800 Meter Cool Down6:30 (Pace)
4 Mile Tempo5:30 (Pace)
800 Meter Cool Down6:30 (Pace)
1 Milefaster than 5:10

To make a long story short, I adjusted the times above to match what I could do with the humidity as a factor. I ended up doing something like:

(I didn't set up my new Garmin to record the times very well)

1 Mile5:15
800 Meter Cool Down~6:45 (Pace)
4 Mile Tempo5:5x (Pace)
800 Meter Cool Down~6:45 (Pace)
1 Mile5:15

The torture was at a pretty high level during the tempo but it never got any worse so I just kept running. Sean says these are the types of runs that make you tough during racing. After the tempo I finished very well with a 5:15. That's excellent considering how tired my body was. Sean wasn't as interested in my tempo time as he was interested in my final mile time. He said not to worry about the tempo, just make sure I could finish the run strong.

Speaking of Sean. He's turned into an animal. He hammered a much faster version of the above workout and seems to be getting better and better.

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