Speed Work and Youtube!

Yesterday Amy and I met with Coach Rich for the first speed workout since before the Newport Marathon.

It's actually the first Speed Workout I've been too with him leading in about 2 months.


It really emphasized how good of a coach he is.

Even though he knows WAy more about running than I probably ever will, and he has years of coaching experience, the thing that always impresses me the most is that he LISTENS.

Not so much about what is actually coming out of your mouth but about what you need from him as a coach.

Yesterday also emphasized that even though when I do drills I feel like an even bigger dork than I usually do...I need to do them a lot more often.

By often I mean more than when he's in front of me.

I also need to work on my core more.

So we did our drills and he maybe laughed at us a bit while we flailed around.  But the immediate feed back and taking the time to make sure we understood the correction and WHY it would help our running was awesome.

He cut our pre-workout workout short because *Amy* was sweating up a storm (poor girl just melts in warm weather) and maybe I didn't mind cutting it a bit short. That is one thing I struggle with that Rich really helps me at.  I have a hard time adjusting a workout for myself based on how I feel.  If I'm supposed to do 6 X 1000 meters I'll do them...they'll be a hot mess at the end but I'll do them.

The thing is, it's not actually better for me to do them all flailing around then to stop at the point where I can maintain proper form but do fewer.

We then did a Declining Interval workout just to see where we are in our recovery.

* Edit...I'm having some conflict on what these times translate into pace wise, so we're just sticking with elapsed time for now.
800 meters - 3:22
400 meters - 1:28
200 meters - 0:41

It was weird to run so close to Amy during this workout.  I ended up second guessing my pacing because I NEVER run that close to her unless I've screwed something up royally. I even thought about passing her on the 800.  I DID pass her on the 400 and that was super weird feeling.

She kept in front for the 200 though.  I'm not so great at getting up to speed quickly.  Not like she is.  I didn't have quite enough distance to work it in.

My average hr was 153 but my max was 181.  I felt pretty good!

After I got home I did a workout I found on youtube.com
This is the second time I've done the video.  The first time I felt slightly more than pleasantly sore the day after.  This time I was kind of disappointed that I wasn't as sore as last time.  I always wonder if I didn't work as hard or something...

I DID wear my heart rate monitore during it and discovered that by the end my heart rate average was 141 bpm.  Which was interesting to me because I know my heart rate is at about 160 during my long runs.