I ran 9 miles today in 1:08:58. First I ran over to the track, and after finishing up 2 miles barefoot (1 mile to the track plus 1 mile on the track), with one stride of about 50 meters thrown in to get the legs moving, I ran a small workout. After my 2 mile tempo last Saturday exposed some weaknesses of mine I decided to take a beginning step towards fixing things. The two main weaknesses that I could think of were a weakness when running uphill (lack of strength/power), and an inability to get my legs moving at a reasonable pace once the terrain flattened out (potentially for the same reason). I have come up with a few ways that I can remedy those problems. My main idea is that I simply need to run more, and that the strength will come from putting more miles in my legs as I get in better shape (this should fix at least 90% of the problem). The next idea is to run hill repeats and instead of backing off at the top of the hill I will attempt to pick up the pace (at least maintain the effort) once the terrain flattens out for a minute or so. Another idea I have considered is to do some box jumps, etc every other day or so (I am not so keen on this idea) in order to increase strength/power without needing to go to a gym to lift weights. Another idea is to run a hard but submaximal effort for a set distance, followed by running some short sprints immediately after finishing in order to get myself used to changing gears even when fatigued. The final idea listed above is what I decided to start with today because it seemed to be the easiest logistically for me to pull off (other than simply running more, which I am doing already), while it was also easy for me to keep the workout small enough that it should not put me over the top from a fatigue perspective (this has been a problem lately as I have been building mileage which has forced me to basically eliminate hard workouts). I decided to run a fast 1600 with a sprint over the last 50-80 meters, followed by more short sprints every 200 meters thereafter (approximately). I thought that 5:20 for 1600 should be fast enough, but I decided to not look at my watch and just focus on how things felt rather than the time. I started the 1600 fairly quickly, however I slowed down after maybe 200 meters and settled into a nice pace. It had rained earlier in the morning and I could tell it was much more humid than it has been lately. I could see the steam rising off of the track when the sun came out from behind the clouds. I ended up starting my final sprint with maybe 60 meters left and I finished the 1600 in 5:16, so pretty much right where I was hoping to be. After 200 meters I ran the next sprint, and I repeated this every 200 meters thereafter (so about 150 meter recovery) until I had completed 4 additional sprints. After finishing the workout I feel like this did not target my problem areas in the way that I had hoped. I really do need to add the hills into the initial hard portion of the workout for it to work. The hard 1600 just did not feel like it was taxing enough to do what I wanted, while running at speeds that are fast enough to stress me sufficiently may get me hurt. If I run this same workout with the hard mile run uphill I will not need to run as fast, but I should be able to stress the system sufficiently to produce some sort of effect.
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