Confusion on the Track

I made the decision this week to step up my training by adding in strength. Hoo boy! Shocking how fast I’ve lost all the strength I gained in pre-season training. I strength trained yesterday then hopped on my bike to ride to work. No problem! Only this morning, I couldn’t quite get out of bed. You see, the one thing I am very naughty about cutting out is stretching. My hamstrings were not pleased with me.

I debated whether to go, then decided I’d go and just jog lightly if I had to. Hah!

I was so tight and sore that I struggled through the warm-up. When it got to the reps, our coach decided a little mental math was in order to wake everyone up. So, you have 4 cones set up as follows:

**                                           *                                              *                              ***

The double star  = start, triple star = turn around.

The reps were: 

400m rep / 400m recovery

800m rep / 400m recovery

1200m rep / 400m recovery

1600m rep / 400 m recovery

1200m rep / 400m recovery

800m rep / 400m recovery

400m rep / 400m recovery (I think only a few people actually made it the full way through within the time frame!)

Now, it all may seem pretty simple to those of you visually staring at the little stars and plotting out your course.

Now imagine it is 5.30am. It’s dark, you’re exhausted, and with every step your hamstrings are screaming at you in anger at not being granted a rest day. To try and do mental math on top of that just doesn’t work.

The 400m rep was fine.

The 800m rep was fine.

But then at the 1200m rep, brains stopped functioning. Confusion ensued as some people recovered 400m early, calling out to those on the rep that they’ve miscounted and are doing 400m extra. I mean, it’s one thing to run this all in a straight line and do mental calculations but add a turn-around in the middle of the rep and runners are stumped.

Looking at the diagram I am pretty sure that – despite the odds – I was actually one of the people who ran the 1200m as a 1200m (as opposed to an 800m or a 1600m).

I got up to the 1600m before time forced me to draw it to a close. I managed one more 800m rep and then it was all over. Thank goodness!

Unfortunately, this brain overload of so many lap variations meant I had no brain power left to remember to split time my watch for the rep/recoveries. So it defaulted to doing km count-outs instead.

Total Time: 53.51

Total Km: 8.75

Average Pace: 6.09

Total Elevation: 18m

Split paces

Warm up:  6.19

Reps by km markers (inc recoveries): 6.13 / 5.40 / 5.54 / 6.33 / 5.45 / 6.45 / 6.18

Cool down: 5.51 (ironically faster!)