Solid track

Good, solid BTC track session last night.

It was a smaller than usual turn out, probably given the shocking weather we are having at the moment (although the session turned out to be totally dry and actually really nice running weather - albeit very muggy).

After the warm up, stride throughs and a 1km tempo, the main set involved 4 x 1km repeats with a 1 x lap (333m) recovery between each km. The aim of the 1km’s was to build each lap so that the last lap of each 1km rep was to be run at 10km race pace, i.e. building through the km.

My aim was to run the last lap in 80 seconds which is 40 minute pace which would make the first 2 laps 90 and 85 seconds respectively.

Luckily, there seemed to be a few guys who also wanted to run at this pace and so I managed to settle into a pretty consistent group of guys, taking it in turn to lead and we managed to build through each of the km’s. As expected, the 1^st and 2^nd km’s were probably a little quick, which meant that the 3^rd and 4^th km’s were harder, although still comfortable.

The splits basically followed what I wanted to achieve, although typically we were 2 or 3 seconds under our target times for each lap which is encouraging.

This was all followed by a warm down, long core session and stretch.

Overall, a good session, and I certainly feel like am becoming more used to running at 40 min pace which is where I want to be. I do feel that I need to spend more time running at this threshold pace though so that when I come to race, I am used to running at this pace and pain level!