Thursday night meant the Red Team was taking to the track. Murat and I were hoping that the Coupers would join us, but they came up with some mildly-tolerable excuses.
While I had a tough 6x800m workout that Murat might join me for, his main reason for stopping by was a 600m all-out time trial. Murat has agreed to let me train him for an 800m race – hoping to get himself back under the 2min barrier – and this 600m would be a good temperature-check.
Speaking of temperature, it was still in the 80s when we first hit the track around 7:30pm, but far more pleasant than the midday heat.
The track was scorching hot however, as Olympic Gold Medalist Matt Centrowitz was back out on the oval ripping some interval repeats. Matt is also racing in the 5th Avenue Mile next weekend, though I don’t think we’ll be in the same heat…
After a few miles warmup and some strides, Murat threw on his spikes and stepped onto lane one for his time trial.
He crushed it. 1:29.
In fact, he looked so good that its not out of the question that he could run a sub-2min 800m right now.
If that isn’t great coaching, I don’t know what is.
My workout would be pretty tough:
2 miles easy
Dynamic Warmup + 4x15sec strides
6x800m in 3:05 w/200m jog in between
1 mile easy
The workout went well… on paper. I hit the splits just fine, averaging about 3:02, but I felt terrible. My legs were heavy and tight and it was a huge mental drag holding that pace. I should be able to run at 6:10/mile pace without that much discomfort.
Following the intervals, I began my cool-down jog and felt incredibly light-headed. I’ve had some weird sinus-type-headache lately. Rather than risk it, we just walked a half mile. Oh well.
My legs were a mess following the workout, but I’ll take the result and move on. Two more tough workouts before 5th Avenue – one on Sunday, and then a real monster on Tuesday.
