Monday, June 1, 2009

Track workout: your key to breaking an 11:00 mile

Tomorrow morning I am leaving the house at 6:00 a.m. to meet Jess for my first early morning track workout at Burlington High School. What the heck is '200' anyway?

Her workout plan calls for four to six 200s easy and four to six 200s fast. I mean, I know it's 200 meters, but what does 200 meters look like? Basically it's half a lap on an outdoor track, or 1/8 mile. Thank you, Google!

I'm meant to warm-up with a 1 mile jog, do the workout ("it's ok to throw up" Jess told me, reassuringly) and run another mile to cool down. Krikies!

Jess is aware that I'm a total newbie to this, and I'm aware that I'm the slowest person she coaches by a pace of several minutes a mile. However, the marathon was just last weekend, so a lot her athletes are in recovery mode right now. To wit, Jess wrote me this encouraging note:

"I think it will be just you and one other client so nobody to point and laugh at you." Excellent!


Update:

I was pretty daunted when I walked up to the track this morning and saw how huge it looked. So much for trying to minimize "just half a lap." And I refused to be intimidated by the very nice man with thighs the size of tree trunks who was also there for interval training.

This workout was fun! Yes, that sounds psycho, but I found out that I'm faster (over short distances) than I suspected and I was able to run five 200 sprints without throwing up. Best time: 43 seconds, slowest time: 55 seconds. (I think -- I might be a second off).

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