Archive for October 27th, 2008

Another S title.  This one is due to the strange workout I just did.

With the Bridge Challenge 10K coming up this weekend, I had mentioned last week I wanted to do a fast workout in prep for it but was in a quandary due to having just done a marathon.  I waffled for a bit and finally decided I would play it safe, be lazy and just do strides this week.

Now we all know I’m a Pfitzinger Pfan since he got me to the marathon safely and confidently with his book Advanced Marathoning.  I also own his Road Racing for Serious Runners which has plans for all distances of races, though not as scheduled as the other book, this one gives you the workouts you need to do, you have to figure out the days.

Anyway, I opened it up to the 10K plan and checked out the last week.  It has the requisite easy, short LRs (oxymoron, but after marathon training, anything shorter than 17 isn’t really Long anymore), nothing in the VO2 column, but in the Basic Speed column sits 5 x 300m.  Hmmm…  Basic Speed for Pfitz is always strides, most commonly 100s, in this 10K plan he also has a couple 200m sessions, but 300m was a new one on me.  I even went to RunningTimes.com to see if he’d written anything about a 300m stride session but didn’t find anything.

Not exactly an interval workout, a little faster actually since strides end up being quite a bit faster than 5k pace, though stride recoveries are whatever it takes to get your HR back to normal which keeps it from being a VO2max exercise.  Interesting.  I thought about it and was thinking it seemed a waste to go 300m since it’s not really helping VO2, and is maybe harder than a stride session needs to be, but on the other hand…what the hell?  It only adds up to a mile of fast, so why not give it a go?  Besides, Pete’s The Man, so if he thinks it’s a good idea, it must be.

So that’s what I did today, I ran 7 and near the end did 5×300.  I enjoyed it!  Much easier than an interval session, while feeling like I was doing something good for my legs and body.  I didn’t pay attention to my watch during them, but now that I’m home, I see they got progressively faster without thinking about it, starting with 7:08 pace, ending with 6:47.

Yeah, I know, not supposed to think about speed with strides, it’s for legs and form but the fact that they were 300s coupled with the way I run my strides (like intervals – I don’t accelerate, peak, then slow down before it’s over…I just run the things) makes it fun to see in retrospect.

And that, blog friends, was my entertainment for the day, running in spurts and making up new words to go with them.  Now it’s time to shower, return some almost overdue library books and figure out what we’re eating tonight, a subject that annoyingly comes up 365 time a year.  “What do you want to eat tonight?”  ” I dunno, what do you feel like?” “I dunno”  Then I go shopping for I Dunno, can’t find it and settle on a chicken.