The first race of the Pete Glavin Cross Country series is just 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.
For the rest of the fall, meet on Tuesday nights at 6 PM and be ready to start at 6:15 PM (earlier than the 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 2023 and, if you’re coming 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. 
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 and enter a recent race time and then 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 run loops around the big field and sculpture garden in the bowl. Half of each loop will be done between I and R pace—5K to 1-mile race pace—with a focus on hitting the short hill in the middle with good form, without slowing down, and maintaining the pace after the hill to the end of the sculpture garden. Once you pass the lewd sculpture (really!), you can turn and run at E pace (not your slowest jog) for the rest of the loop and start again without stopping. Because they’re so short, we’ll be doing a bunch of reps, at least 10 for those without much weekly mileage and 25 or more for those with the mileage to support the workout. The workout has two goals: maintaining good hill running form as you tire and learning to switch gears.
Any questions? See you Tuesday night! (And yes, we’ll bring some racing singlets to try on.)
Resources
- Pace Calculator: Jack Daniels VDOT Running Calculator
- Warmup: Jay Johnson’s Leg Swings and/or Lunge Matrix, then at least 10 minutes of jogging
- Cooldown: At least 10 minutes of jogging, then Jay Johnson’s Strength and Mobility
- FLRC Calendar: (Download and import this ICS file for most calendar apps; subscribe to fingerlakesrunners@gmail.com if you use Google Calendar.)