Oh look! I managed to completely avoid the hilly little 500m loop this morning!
It is many years since I was serious about short interval training, but wanting to run middle distance track races makes such speed work necessary.
Today's session was 200m intervals as described below.
Stromlo Forest Park has posts every 100m, just one missing, and with the grassy undulating track and its availability early in the morning, make it ideal for Sunday training. Except for the lack of shade.Be that as it may, many training patterns are possible. I designed this 15 x 200m session for today. Three sets of five.
(a) 5 x (200m fast 200m slow) around the 2k circuit.
(b) 100m slow then 4 x (200m fast, 200m slow), one final 200m fast, then 100m slow; around the circuit.
(c) 5 x (200m slow, 200m fast) around the circuit.
And a short drink break was enjoyed at the start line after each set.Each fast 200m was different from all the others. Actually, psychologically, I could just as easily run out and back over the same 200m track. But doing it this way is fun, because the hills, breeze, views etc change for each interval. And it beats running on a 400m athletic track.
Dave was funny, he miscounted a couple of times and ended up completing a sixth 200m in the first set and a sixth in the second set. So after doing the third set as planned he ran still another 200 to make it 18. After that he decided to do two more to make it a "round" 20. Then surprisingly he was rather pooped.
It is many years since I was serious about short interval training, but wanting to run middle distance track races makes such speed work necessary.
Today's session was 200m intervals as described below.
Stromlo Forest Park has posts every 100m, just one missing, and with the grassy undulating track and its availability early in the morning, make it ideal for Sunday training. Except for the lack of shade.Be that as it may, many training patterns are possible. I designed this 15 x 200m session for today. Three sets of five.
(a) 5 x (200m fast 200m slow) around the 2k circuit.
(b) 100m slow then 4 x (200m fast, 200m slow), one final 200m fast, then 100m slow; around the circuit.
(c) 5 x (200m slow, 200m fast) around the circuit.
And a short drink break was enjoyed at the start line after each set.Each fast 200m was different from all the others. Actually, psychologically, I could just as easily run out and back over the same 200m track. But doing it this way is fun, because the hills, breeze, views etc change for each interval. And it beats running on a 400m athletic track.
Dave was funny, he miscounted a couple of times and ended up completing a sixth 200m in the first set and a sixth in the second set. So after doing the third set as planned he ran still another 200 to make it 18. After that he decided to do two more to make it a "round" 20. Then surprisingly he was rather pooped.
