XC workout Tuesday 8/20 at 6 PM (new time!) at the Cornell Botanic Gardens

Group Runs & Workouts
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The first race of the Pete Glavin Cross Country series is just over a month away (sign up soon!), so we’re moving our weekly workouts from Stewart Park to our fall location for better grass and hill running opportunities.

Meet on Tuesday nights at 6 PM and be ready to start at 6:15 PM (earlier than our summer workouts since darkness will be encroaching) at the parking area in the bowl of the F. R. Newman Arboretum in the Cornell Botanic Gardens (Google Maps pin).

Everyone is welcome, though you must sign the FLRC Training Programs waiver once for 2024 and, if you come regularly, be an FLRC member. You don’t have to run the PGXC series—the workouts are great social running on their own—but we’ll try to recruit you. :wink:

For those who haven’t done my workouts before, I use the Jack Daniels system, which has several recommended paces, such as E (easy), M (marathon), T (threshold), I (interval), and R (repetition). The beauty of Jack’s system is that you can go to a pace calculator , enter a recent race time, and click the Training tab to determine your personalized paces for various distances. The pace calculator will always be linked at the bottom of these posts. You’ll also find my recommended warmup and cooldown exercises linked there, which we’ll try to do each week, weather permitting.

For our first workout, after we do dynamic warmups and 10 minutes of jogging, we’re going to do surging grass loops in the Arbor Road field below where we meet (see the image below for the workout location and locations of additional parking spots). We’ll reconvene at the top of the Arbor Road loop. I’ll assign everyone to one of two groups by rough pace/weekly mileage, and each group will start running around the loop.

Arbor-Road-loops
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I’ll start the workout by blowing a whistle. Group A will surge to I pace (5K race pace), while Group B will continue to run at E pace (conversational pace). After 15 to 60 seconds, I’ll blow the whistle again, at which point Group A drops to E pace and Group B surges to I pace. Every subsequent time I blow the whistle, the groups will swap paces. We’ll keep this up for 15-20 minutes or until it seems like people have had enough—the reps are short, so they shouldn’t be too taxing. But with lots of people on the relatively short loop (and plenty of places to cut short if you want—it’s about time, not distance), there should be some fun group chaos.

The goal of this workout is to help you learn how to run at different paces and to change gears as necessary in a race to pass someone on a turn, extend a lead on a straightaway, or kick into the finish. You never know when you’ll need to surge in a race, so the random nature of the timing will help your legs learn to respond as needed, rather than at a specified time or distance.

Any questions? See you Tuesday night! (And yes, we’ll bring some racing singlets to try on—we should get another order started soon.)

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