Tuesday, July 24, 2007

TNT #14 - July 24, 2007

Great night for a workout, considering just about everyone there raced over the weekend. We made our first TNT road trip, running at Meadow Wood Park (or whatever) which sits just on Falls Road, north of 695. What we discovered is a great place to do tempo runs!

The goal was to do two 15-minute tempo sessions, with a 5-minute rolling warmup and 5-minute recovery in between sets. The idea was to run this at a comfortably hard pace, something you could keep up for 15 minutes. This is the first time in our two years that we have done something like this, and it was a different kind of hard than we're used to.

The route that we ran was predominantly on the grass, which was uneven at times and each lap presented us with a nice little climb uphill, followed by a gentle downhill through a field with a stiff crosswind. We're calling the loop a mile, based on the fact we had a measured 8/10 of a mile if we stayed on the paved path, and our little additions had to have added .2 miles per lap. If it was short, it wasn't by much, because I feel like the times were fairly consistent with being accurate. There were 12 of us taking on the workout tonight, so the numbers were down a little, but we did have two newcomers in Will and Tim.

The temperature was a cool feeling 77-80 degrees, and it was mostly cloudy with what looked like threats of thunderstorms. All in all it was a great workout, nice to get off the track and a good midsummer break! This marks the halfway point in our track practice season. Next week we will be taking on some hills, so get ready!

It's a 500m long hill situated just about a mile away from the Gilman Track, so we'll meet at Gilman at 6:30 and run our warmup over to the hill. Then we'll do probably 8 repeats, or as many as you can handle.

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