With John (our coach) out of town for the next two weeks at the Olympic Track & Field trials, and not receiving an official workout from Jim Spivey, Dan suggested the group do 400m intervals at track tonight. However, our normal 400m workout is 3 sets of 3 x 400m repeats, but tonight we did 4 sets of 3 x 400m repeats! This is almost 4.5-miles of intervals, which is pretty long for our group. On top of this it was still 95º at 6pm, so needless to say it was fairly tough.
Here’s a rundown of the night…
- 2-Mile Warmup
- 6 x 100m Stride Outs
- 4 Sets of 3 x 400m vf (200m recovery / 400m recovery)
- 1/2-Mile Cool Down
For a normal 400m workout we will do a mixture of “fresh” and “good” paced repeats within each set. However, with the very high temps tonight, and the longer workout, Dan advised us to do each one at “very fresh” pace which should be 3 to 5 seconds slower than “fresh” per interval. Recently my “fresh” paced 400m splits have been around 82 to 84 seconds, so tonight I was shooting for something between 86 and 88.
As has been the case for the past few weeks, I basically ran tonight’s workout by myself. While my legs felt pretty good throughout, I did have some difficulty dealing with the heat and this led to a little less consistency between repeats than I would have liked. This was especially true during the first one and last one. Here is a rundown on my splits per set:
- Set 1 (86, 88, 84)
- Set 2 (88, 88, 86)
- Set 3 (86, 88, 89)
- Set 4 (88, 89, 90)
By the last set I could feel the heat pulsing in my face, but tried to stay as consistent as I could until the end. I lost a couple of seconds during the final two repeats, but overall I’m pretty happy with the workout and how I felt. Just like last week I drank 64 ounces of fluid during the evening + a little bit more from the water fountain at the track, because it was HOT! Final total with warmup and cool down was 8-miles completed at 7:35 average pace per mile.
My daughter Kate came with me to the track tonight, so we got to enjoy another impromptu daddy-daughter date night after the workout. We had dinner at Pei Wei followed by FroYo at Sweet CeCe’s. Great night!
Beast Mode….ON!