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February 14, 2006
florida is where it's at
A couple weeks ago when I tried (unsuccessfully) to quit my job, one of the things my boss mentioned was being more diligent about taking comp days in exchange for working weekends. Since this past weekend had one of those all-nighters, I am dutifully taking today off from work. It's sunny and cold (high 30s this morning, coldest it's been all season), and just beautiful for road 400s. I've owned a GPS for over a year but only recently discovered that you can program simple interval workouts on it. You can't do ladders or descending-rests, but 20*(400s with 100m recovery) works, unless you're a techno-dolt like me who programmed the recoveries as .1 mile (doh!).
I've run some fake track workouts on the road before, but never anything as regimented as this. The watch would beep and I'd go bat out of hell for a quarter-mile. At the next beep I'd slow to a jog, then exactly a tenth of a mile later the thing would beep and I'd have to start bat out of helling again. None of the usual ways of fudging (bathroom breaks, water breaks, etc) were available to me as long as I kept moving forward. I suppose I could have come to a complete stop during the recoveries (to gain more rest time), but I didn't think of that. I was surprised and happy to find the goal pace was completely reasonable, and I was doing pretty well for 8 or 10 reps when my calf started getting tight. I decided to ignore it, but by the 14th item it was noticeably tighter, so I stopped after 16 quarters (boo). I have a lot of miles to run this week, and I want to make sure I can run all of them. Also, I'm a wuss.
Posted by joe positive at February 14, 2006 1:43 PM