Track Workouts: The Great Equalizer

Ten days left before the Brooklyn half and I'm willing to pull out all the stops to be ready to rock on game day. Whatever it takes. The way I see it, not running sub 1:23 would be be upsetting, but running something like 1:23:07 would pretty much be devastating. Like painting my walls black and sitting in my room listening to Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana by Mascagni over and over again - sadly this wouldn't be the first time it's happened, and I don't feel like spending my weekend eating a tube of cookie dough and crying. So with every run, every meal, every sober minute, it's because I don't want to look at those seven seconds at the end of the 1:23 and think about what if.

With that in mind I turned to the advice of my personal running guru, the incomparable Coach Jonathan Cane of City Coach to see what I could do over the next few days to be tippity tip top on the 30th. He thought that I still had time for some speed, some hills, and some distance before getting rested and ready, and I believe the man. So tonight I headed over to the East 6th Street track to turn left a few times.

Results? I guess those are to be seen, but track workouts hurt. I've done maybe three since I stopped running track in college and I always forget about the painful part. Plus I was already a little sore from playing kickball yesterday (which is sad on multiple levels), so I wasn't really feeling the fast, but I did 1 x 1200 at 3K pace, 6 X 400 at 5K pace, and another 1200 at 5K pace. I did the first 1200 at 4:06, then split the 400s at 1:18, 1:18, 1:14, 1:17, 1:20, and 1:03. Yeah, 1:03. I felt like the other five were relatively easy and I wanted to see if I could go under 1 minute - which I've still yet to do since saying that it was something I wanted to do.

The result of that was a final 1200 that felt like I was carrying a piano up a flight of stairs while monkeys and old people hurled feces at me. First lap wasn't pretty at 1:31. But just before I'm about to call it a night Don't Slow Down by Matt and Kim came on the iPod and considering it a sign from the mighty mighty running gods I thought about what I wrote earlier - every lap counts right now, and if I can't dig down deep on the last 800 of a workout how will I do it if I need to on race day?

So I did the last two laps in 1:27 and 1:25. Still slower than I would have liked but there are few feelings better then telling the voice that wants you to quit to shut the fuck up. Thank you Matt, thank you Kim, and thank you running gods.