Hello, running

Speed session! The best part of this is the length...20 minutes! At Steve Moneghetti’s advice, I pre-fatigued my legs and headed out to fartlek training. I may have been a little less than impressed by him at the training camp, but world records and first place finishes in half marathon and
marathon events do not lie. So when I hit Steve up for advice on improving my times, I certainly listened to his suggestions! Especially when his rationales made sense.
So I started out the day with 45min of plyometrics before hitting a fartlek session. Plyometrics, for those who don’t know, is essentially jumping. Mostly, variations of a jump squat. Certainly something I would classify as ‘pre-fatiguing’.
Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to make my watch all pretty and give me lap times + pace, so I settled on arranging lap times and figured I’d see my pace at the end. The bonus of this is it’s teaching me to learn my pace sans technology to depend on. My goal for today was to run a
5min pace for the reps and recover at a quick jog. As I improve, I hope to estimate my pace better and have faster recoveries.

Total time: 20.11
Total distance: 3.68
Avg pace: 5.31
90sec rep/recovery x2: 4.49/6.32 \ 5.35/5.59
60sec rep/recovery x4: 4.53/6.08 \ 4.42/5.59 \ 5.14/6.37 \ 5.34/6.20
30sec rep/recovery x4: 4.47/6.09 \ 4.50/6.26 \ 4.59/5.41 \ 4.54/6.38
15sec rep/recovery x4: 4.55/5.19 \ 4.39/5.04 \ 4.04/5.04 \ 4.36/5.10

For anyone who didn’t mindlessly skim or skip the split times, you’ll notice discrepancies in the rep/recovery! In an ideal training world I would have driven the 30min to get to a nice flat track on which to do my reps. In the real world, the street outside my house felt much more practical
& accessible – even with the minor hills. Okay, I wouldn’t call them true “hills”, but there was obviously some kind of unevenness to account for some of those recovery times!
And you know what? As I was working through my reps I passed a few other runners. One of whom smiled and said “great job!”. My response? I grinned and waved back. I was pretty happy with how I was going. I felt no urge to make excuses – I was too busy running.

I promise I will post my running goals for this year soon. I planned them last weekend at training camp as I'd hoped I would - I just need to gather the courage to publicly announce them in writing! But I will say this: my pre-season training has officially ended and my actual training season has begun. I think it's going to be a great year!