Race Simulation

Tomorrow is the NIRCA regional meet at Belmont Plateau. Tomorrow I am also taking the FE exam all day, which is a really big engineering test that I signed up for before the dates for these meets were released. Due to this unfortunate conflict I thought I should do a race simulation-type workout instead. I settled on doing 5000 meters of sprint 100/float 100 on the track. I had done this workout only once before, during the spring of 2010, and I ran about 15:32 and subsequently ran 14:46 that season so I was excited to see what I could do this time around. When I thought about doing this workout I had 15 flat as a time to shoot for in the back of my mind, but that was only a convenient round number. I really had no idea what I could do but decided to just go out and shoot for a good effort.

I ended up running 14:56, and it was HARD. I was working hard by 3 laps in and 2 miles in I thought that it would be a good workout even if I stopped there. Instead I kept at it and ran consistently (the range of 1600 splits was 3 seconds). I'm really happy about this workout; I was completely by myself without any company even on the track, and tried to keep the efforts honest and only hammer the straights. Hopefully that means I'm in near-PR shape for 5k, since I know I have plenty of strength to carry me the extra 3k, and with the 5k speed endurance I hope to pop a really fast few races coming up.

I decided on this workout because it forms a capstone to the pyramid of training that I've done since June. I ran about 6 weeks of quality strength/threshold work to prepare for my half marathon, then a few weeks of 8k/10k pace work, then a little bit of sharpening/faster than 8k pace work, and finally these last few workouts integrate all of those different energy systems to get the body racing fit. I'm racing 2 big races starting in 2 weekends, so next week I'll do 2 more hard workouts, either at faster than race pace or at goal pace but with little rest, both with the goal of further preparing my body to race as well as possible over 8k. Then it's time to slack off (I believe the technical term is "taper") and race well!