Second Speed Workout Ever

Last night I did my second speed workout ever. (The first was a fluke that hadn’t thus far been repeated.) There are a couple high school tracks around here that I could use, but the trail out at the Gilruth is actually very well-suited to 400-meter repeats. It is marked every quarter mile (i.e. every ~400 meters) and winds out along the back fence for a mile before hitting a fairly straight section where I can do the repeats by going back-and-forth before running the mile back to the parking lot as a cooldown.

So I headed out in the chill (The cold front finally came through! I am wearing a sweater today! A sweater! YESSSS!) to do a warmup mile in 11 minutes. My Achilles/shins started to hurt around the half-mile point and continued through my first 400 bit.

I ran the first 400 repeat straight out of the mile warmup (no pause) and did it in 2:05. My legs were still hurting. From there I walked the 400 meters back to my starting point at which point the pain had gone away and stayed away for the rest of the evening, returning only slightly when I did my mile cooldown back to the car.

This just begs the question: what about my running style causes this pain? It doesn’t happen when I’m running fast, as in speedwork or soccer games. Thus I am forced to think that the pain has something to do with the fact that I am a plodder. A slow runner.

(Note to Cassie — thanks for the email. I know I do a weird turn thing with my right leg, and I think that has something to do with the overuse injury still happening in my knee. The thing about the Achilles/shin pain is that it occurs equally in both legs. Strange.)

Anyway. Enough with me whining about my hurting legs. After the 2:05 repeat, the rest went as follows: 1:50, 1:50, 1:51, 1:53. Each was followed by a ~4-minute walk of the 400 meters back to my starting point. As I progress, I plan to start jogging those recoveries, I think.

My only question, and I’m sure the HRBers will chime in, is whether I’m doing my repeats too fast. Since I’m really a 10:00 miler at best (and currently more like a 10:45 miler), I think my 400-meter repeat time should be something like 2:15. I tried to look it up but can’t find a working pace calculator at the moment.

Anyway, then I did a 10:45 mile to cool down. Total distance for the workout was 4.5 miles, total time was 52:16, average heart rate 167, max heart rate 228. I am a freak of nature — according to theory, my heart should have exploded. Or something.