Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Speed 'Stache Results

Last night included a track workout at our friendly neighborhood highschool. There were tons of people there enjoying the first warm day of the season (it stayed in the 60s until somewhere in the middle of the night), including some mildly decent lookers who were probably jail bait.


Just Get to it Man!

You didn't come here to hear about the jail bait and old ladies in big ass sweaters wearing cheap knockoffs of French perfumes at the track. Ladies whose perfume was so strong that the 30MPH wind couldn't usher it away fast enough. In fact, I think I hacked up a chunk of perfume this morning.

Well, as I mentioned yesterday it was the maiden voyage (is there a masculine form of maiden?) for the Speed 'Stache in a real speed situation. I was doing 800m intervals (twice around) with one lap (400m) recovery in between. My plan had me doing 8 sets, which when you add a mile warmup and cooldown ends up being about 32 laps or ~8 miles. The speed 'stache would take care of the 800m intervals and I would have to do the recovery, warmup and cooldown laps. It seemed like a marriage made in heaven.

Well, I don't know if I was still feeling the effects of my blood letting last week or if I was dehydrated from only drinking coffee all day, or if my belly was unhappy with the peanut butter sandwich I ate right before running, or if maybe the Double-Ess just needed to blow out the pipes, as they say, but I was dogging it.

My first 400m was right on the money, but the second was way slower. The idea is to be consistent so the next set I took a little off the first lap in the hopes I would run the same pace the second. Nope, slow again. Finally I decided if I was going to be able to run the full workout I'd have to slow it down even more, which was way slower than I wanted to go. It worked though, and until I started getting full body cramps in the second-to-last set I was pretty consistent.

The steady 30MPH wind made it slow on one side, and there were some booties that were very distracting every few laps, but I managed to do 7 of the 8 prescribed sets. All in all, I can't say I was disappointed with my performance though. It was the first real track workout of the season and also the first day above 43 degrees since last fall. I actually felt like heat was a factor; how absurd is that?

Oh, but my kick (or the Speed 'Stache's kick) for the last 100m of the last interval clocked in around a 4 minute mile pace (for 100m, not a whole mile). WHAT! That shit is fast. This dude was sitting on the bleachers with his son and I'm sure all he heard was hoo, hoo, hee, hee, hee, hoo, hoo, hee, hee, hee as a handsomely mustachioed train flew by him, snapping his neck.

PlacaTAN!





Over and Out,
Old Coot

1 comment:

Abbey said...

Oh, Todd, these last few posts have been well worth the wait! Muchas gracias, senor!

"Something inside of me just said 'Hey, wait a minute, I want to beat him.' and I just took off." -Pre