Tuesday, February 19, 2013

4 x 400, 3 x 1600, 4 x 400

Another beast of a track session. I wanted to push myself tonight and conditions looked to be good tonight being dry and very cool.

A longish warm-up of 6km including a few strides then time to go. The first 400 was pathetic, then slowly got going. I reset my watch when I got home so all of these are from memory but it went something like:

75/72/72/71
5:03/5:01/5:01
70/70/69/66

Happy with those. I felt comfortable on the 4 lappers and the last one felt the easiest of the lot. A bit disappointed not to run a few sub 5's but I was running solo and with over 70 people on the track there was a fair bit of overtaking/running wide.

Nearly forgot to give you the recoveries - 30 secs between the 400's (blink and it's gone), 60 seconds between the 1600's (tough but fair) and 2 minutes between the sets (lovely).

Greaney was flying tonight. Suddenly he has found another gear and ran a much improved session. Christy also improving week on week and a big race is now due. Great to see.

All up 17.5kms with warm-down.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Matt, I'm trying to up my mileage at the moment as well as keeping up the sessions twice a week. When you feel a slight twinge the day after intervals in the calf, should you always complete the mileage even if it means trudging along smoothly?

Do you base your interval sessions on effort alone or go all out? Should you be feeling an adrenaline rush during them? I've been going quite steady during mine but not enough to hit max HR, want to improve but not sure if I'm going about this in the right manner. Thanks!

BeerMatt said...

Anon, I'd test out the calf/niggle the next day by running very easy. If you feel any discomfort then best to stop. Missing out on a few miles isn't important in the grand scheme of things. If you feel fine then a couple of easy days running and you can get back into the faster stuff.

I don't tend to run my efforts all out - if you're doing a session the coach should give you an idea of the pace to be running at. The best advice I heard recently is that you should probably finish the session feeling like you could have done one more rep (rather than in a vomiting state). Also a good idea to try and run your efforts at a consistent pace rather than start quick and fade as the session progresses. That comes with experience.

I don't tend to feel the adrenaline rush during training, I think that comes more with the thrill of racing. I've never trained using HR so I can't really comment there but if you speak to a coach I'm sure they would help you.

Also if upping mileage then follow the 10% rule - don't increase by more than 10% week on week as you could come a cropper. Lots of common sense really which I'm sure you've heard before!

Good luck with the training and let me know if you have any more questions. Matt