Here’s hoping we have some better weather for workouts this week! Questions, comments, workout reports—let me know how it’s going.
Middle Distance Workouts (5K to 15K)
Last week the marathoners got some hill work, but why should they get all the fun? As always, pick the number of reps based on your weekly mileage.
Workout 1: Your goal here is to find a fairly steep hill that takes you roughly 2 minutes to climb at a hard pace (think I pace effort—the actual speed will be much slower, of course). Run up it hard, then back down easy, and repeat 4-8 times, depending on your weekly mileage. While running uphill, focus on form, and be sure to keep your back straight so you’re leaning into the hill from your ankles, not piking at the waist. My favorite place to do this workout is in the bowl of Cornell’s Arboretum, where you can run up the road on one side, back down, and then up and down each of the paths going up the bowl until you get to the road on the other side. Then go back for as many reps as you need. If the hills are shorter than 2 minutes (sometimes it’s hard to find the right hills), do more of them to get roughly the same 8-16 minutes of speedwork.
Workout 2: 3-5 by 5 minutes at T pace, plus 15 seconds of R pace, followed by 3 minutes of jogging recovery between sets. The idea of adding 15 seconds of R pace here is to help train your body and mind to the discomfort of picking up the pace either during a race to pass someone or to kick at the finish, both of which are essential skills for cross country, where every place matters.
Long Run: 25-30% of your weekly mileage at E pace
Long Distance Workouts (Half Marathon to Marathon)
After last week’s hill work, we’re going to go back to something simple but important—just holding pace.
Workout 1: After your 10-minute warmup, run 45 minutes at M pace, followed by another 10-minutes E for your cooldown. We’ll keep bumping the length of these workouts up every weeks so M pace becomes one of those things you can run forever (or at least until you run 26.2 miles).
Long Run: 25-30% of your weekly mileage at E pace
Resources
Introduction:Background and advice, particularly for those not running 20-25 miles per week
Beautiful morning today on the Jim Schug Trail doing the marathon workout - it’s amazing what wind can do to you! Felt like I had to reach hard for M pace heading north; turned around and accidentally ran 60 mins at M pace and slightly faster because the tailwind helped so much (:
Yeah, wind is real. You got me thinking about it, and in looking it up, it appears that records become ineligible with just a 2 meters-per-second tailwind. That’s 3.9 knots or 4.47 miles per hour. Which doesn’t seem like much. A quick check of Dark Sky’s Time Machine feature suggests that the wind speeds yesterday morning were about 13 MPH, gusting to 24 MPH.
So sorry, but we’re going to have to strike your return back down the Jim Schugg trail from the record books. Though I do think that going south is ever so slightly uphill.
@hubitron and I once ran on Jim Schugg in the early spring, starting out at 45 degrees and sunny. When we turned, the weather changed, with the temperatures dropping fast to the low 30s with a strong headwind and biting snow. I was at least wearing tights and long sleeves—Jay had gone for shorts and was suffering.
The marathon/half marathon pace workout worked well on the Stewart Park/Cass Park waterfront trail. easy to keep pace with the mile markers. However, my pace was too fast at the beginning. Seems to be a Pavlovian response to have a stopwatch going. (I finished the workout only 15 seconds faster than M pace on average, but I could not have run like that forever!) More M pace workouts, please.
Good to hear where you’re struggling a bit, Kate. Learning pace is important, but it can be hard, especially when running by yourself and without a GPS watch. I mentioned breathing patterns a few weeks ago; perhaps you can latch onto something like that to identify pace (or just make sure your first few miles feel too easy).
Though I do think that going south is ever so slightly uphill.