Tuesday night track workout - 6×800m
After Sunday’s 10 mile tempo run, I figured one more quality workout should suffice before I ‘taper’ for the Elizabeth River Run on Saturday. I want to feel fresh for an attempt at a 10k race PR, so 3 days of easy running should help the cause. With that in mind I planned to run 6×800m repeats at around 3:00 minutes each, with just a 200m recovery. It would also give an indication of where my training is in comparison to pre-Frederick Marathon, where I did a similar workout.
After a mile warm up with a few 50m striders, I got to work. First 800m in 2:50, felt easier than the time suggested. Second 800m was covered in 2:52, still felt good. Put a bit more effort into the 3rd repeat and ended up with a 2:50. By this time the usual Tuesday night crowd of kids had showed up at the track for their workout, so the remainder of my repeats were spent dodging everyone who chose to warm up in lane 1! Don’t coaches teach these kids the track etiquette any more?
With a bit of swerving, 800m #4 was completed in 2:53 (the slowest), so I decided to put the hammer down for the final 2 repeats - 2:49 and 2:48 respectively.
All in all a good workout. Heart rate maxed out at 178bpm, so I still had a little in reserve and the legs felt pretty good. Compared to the same workout a month ago, my total time was 2 seconds quicker, but then I was working off a 400m recovery. Last night I was only taking 200m to recover between repeats.
Not sure if this tells me anything with regard to how I’ll perform on Saturday, but I’ll be going all out to break 37:00 minutes for the first time ever.
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June 1st, 2006 at 11:33 am
[…] Summary: Not the greatest training week as I attempted to taper for Saturday’s 10k. In the end I ran too many 2 milers so the only benefit I may have got was from the Tuesday track workout where I ran 6×800m repeats. […]