Week 10 - Day 6

Well, this was the toughest workout I've done to date. I went out this morning at 9 to run with my friend Ken from work. To mark off the 450m distance, I paced it off so I started 50m behind the finish line and lined up in lane 3 (my favorite). Here's what I did (there are some complications here, so bear with me).

Rest: 5 minutes (can take more if needed)
Format: rep - distance - target time (s) - actual time (s)

1 - 450m - 67 - 67.1

I found this rep exhausting, which was a little confusing, because my time was about consistent with a 60 second 400m, but anyway...

2 - 450m - 67 - 76.3

Wow. Talk about a slip. I didn't have much of a kick and the backstretch was painful. After seeing my time, I decided it was reason enough to adjust the rest schedule; about a minute later, though, I said screw it and thought it would be more informative to run on the rest prescribed.

3 - 450m - 67 - 79.1

I felt terrible about this time. At least I hadn't slipped another huge amount, but still. I was confused. And then...it hit me. I'm an idiot! By running from 50m behind the finish line in lane 3, I'd been running too far. I had forgotten to adjust for the lane 3 stagger. Looking back to my times, I felt better about what had happened, because I'd burned it out in the first rep. I'd paced to a 67 but had actually run much faster. Anyway, I'll post my complete "adjusted" times now and then talk about how I adjusted them (I ran the 4th rep in lane 1):

1 - 450m - 67 - 64.1 to 64.9
2 - 450m - 67 - 73.3 to 73.8
3 - 450m - 67 - 76.1 to 76.5
4 - 450m - 67 - 73.4
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While not great, these times at least make more sense. Here's how I adjusted my times. I measured the lane 3 stagger at around 15m. I'd actually been running 465m instead of 450m. So, on the lower end, I subtracted 3 seconds from each time, which comes to a 20 second 100m pace at the end of each rep. This may be a bit much (track people, please weigh in with opinions!), but I reasoned that the extra distance did little to affect my speed/approach for the first half of the race. For the upper limit, I calculated my average pace for each 465m rep and then applied that pace to a 450m distance. This seems conservative to me, for the reasons given above. Finally, for a sanity check on my 15m adjustment estimate, I used this formula (the difference in circumference between two concentric circles) to approximate the extra distance ran from having run in lane 3,

2*Pi*W*(L-1),

where W is the width of each lane (I used W = 42 inches) and L is the lane number you ran in (L = 3). This came out to 13.4 meters, so my 15m estimated passed the sniff test.

Anyway, that got a little technical, but here are the takeaways: I think I could have run faster average times if I hadn't burned out on my first rep. Also, working out last night was probably a mistake. I should have done so yesterday morning, although I have no idea how this would have changed things. All this said, I couldn't have hit 67s today...I'm disappointed, but I'll be over it soon and ready to move forward and get better.