My first Track Workout of the Year!

That's right. I did my first track workout of the year on Saturday. Hell, it was my first track workout in the last decade.  I was excited, scared and nervous as I stepped onto the track, but as soon as I had finished my warmup (an easy 25 minutes), dynamic drills and 4 relaxed strides, I was ready to hit the pavement and fly around the track's turns and bite into the cold northerly wind.

As this was my first 3 workout week of the year I decided to err on the side of caution and chose the low volume options for each workout. We kicked off the week with 500m/1000m repeats on Tuesday, some tempo effort work (2 x 15 minutes) on Thursday and finally some 600m, 400m, 200m repeats on Saturday.

My calves were already getting pretty beat up from the faster work on Tuesday/Thursday and the days were slowly getting warmer, so I had great hopes for Saturday. I awoke to a sunny morning, a forecast of +8C for the day and I was off to St-Thomas Aquinas for my track workout with my fellow Advanced Streamers (London Runner Distance Club). I hadn't slept well the night before, but found that was a non-issue as we kicked off our warm-up. I've been trying to extend my warm-up and cool down periods lately, so I logged in nearly 30 minutes to try and flush out as much of the gunk in my legs as I could. As we did our dynamic drills on the track I learned what it would feel like to be privy to the sounds of a far away war.  And for two hours it didn't stop...apparently the Hunt Club is a busy spot on Saturday mornings.

As I've been taking the low volume approach to my hard workouts this week I was assigned the following workout for the morning:

4x100m strides

2 supersets of 600m, 400m, 600m, 400m, 200m 

4x100m strides 

I had plenty of rest between the two sets of 600m/400m as I was keying off of the higher volume guys who ran 1000m/800m so that we could all start together. Their rest was 2:30, 2:00, 1:30, 1:00. We had 3 minutes rest between the two sets and I made sure to make them active rest. I didn't not want to stop for fear of having my old legs seize up.

I've recovered quite well from the workout and other than my tight calves, I have no other aches or pains....quite surprising to me. I had envisioned being completely sidelined for days, unable to walk or stand.  I'm glad I was able to put in a solid effort, with tons of rest (Thanks Coach!) and I flushed out all the nastiness with lots of easy running.

So now what? Well now I keep prepping myself for my first track meet of the season which looks like it may be the RCLDS Meet on May 8th that features the Ontario Champs over 10,000m.  Last year had a 1500m race, so hopefully there is one this year too!