Happy New Year, runners!
We’re back on the track this week, and to celebrate having Barton Hall entirely to ourselves, we’ll be doing the indoor track form of Ridiculous Relay such that the workout will end up being 8 by 200m at R pace, with lots of lovely randomness and chaos. First, some important notes:
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New waiver: The pre-workout will involve jumping through some administrative hoops. Cornell requires a NEW, IMPROVED! waiver for 2024, so please sign the FLRC 2024 Training Programs waiver. At least I got the full year of dates in, so I hope one signature will be good for the entire year.
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Join FLRC! Everyone is welcome to these workouts, regardless of pace or prior experience, but you must be an FLRC member. Your membership also lets you enter (for free) the Winter Chill 5K series of races every weekend this month, starting Sunday, Jan 7. Pre-registration is required, so sign up soon.
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Don’t let the cows in: Since I’m opening and closing Barton for this workout, please don’t open additional doors or let non-runners in—Cornell is happy to let us run but doesn’t want Barton to be generally open. If someone sneaks in to shoot baskets, I’ll have to kick them out when we leave.
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Mon/Weds workouts: We have permission for Mon/Wed 7 PM workouts now, and we’ll be announcing those here once @Ian is ready to coach them and we figure out how to open/close Barton before it’s generally open again. Stay tuned.
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Hartshorne (1/13), USATF Niagara (1/14), and FLRC track (1/21) meets: To see how these workouts are helping you, be sure to sign up for the Hartshorne Masters Mile (if you’re 40 or older; before Jan 7!) and FLRC’s January track meet. The USATF Niagara Indoor Championship is also at Barton on Jan 14.
On to the workout. Here’s how the relay will work. After our lunge matrix, leg swings, and 10 minutes of warmup jogging, we’ll gather at the starting line and line up in order of mile pace. The first team will be composed of the person on each end of the line and the person in the middle. Once they have picked a baton, the second team will form from the new person on each end and the middle. We’ll continue along those lines, making as many three-person teams as we can. Each team is encouraged to come up with a silly name.
(If we have more than 12 teams, we’ll do 4-person teams instead of 3-person teams. And if the numbers don’t work out evenly, either two people can share a spot, thus getting only 4 reps each, or we can have a smaller team that runs more laps each.)
Once teams are formed, the slower group will line up and run a 200 (one lap) at race pace. They’ll hand off to the middle group of runners using standard relay handoff methods (lining up in order as the runners come in), who will run their 200 and hand off to the faster group for their 200. In between fast laps, each runner should jog a lap or to the water fountain or whatever, paying attention to the other runners on their team so as to be sure to be back at the starting line for their next handoff. Each runner will run 8 laps, and each team is responsible for keeping track of their total laps.
If you’ve never participated in one of our outdoor Ridiculous Relays, don’t be intimidated. This approach is designed to create essentially random, evenly matched teams to help people make friends, work together to run a fast team time, and ensure that everyone feels included. We’ll demo how handoffs work before getting started to make sure everyone understands how to line up and exchange the baton.
Any questions?
See you Tuesday night!
Resources
- Administration: You must be an FLRC member and sign the 2024 waiver!
- Location: All workouts take place at Barton Hall on the Cornell campus
- Parking: Anywhere on campus is fine, but the parking garage is convenient.
- Warmup: Jay Johnson’s Lunge Matrix and Leg Swings, then 10 minutes of jogging
- Cooldown: 10 minutes of jogging, then Jay Johnson’s Strength and Mobility
- Pace Calculator: Jack Daniels’ VDOT Running Calculator
