inauspicio.us

I did my Sunday run on the New Santa Fe trail in Monument yesterday.

20.5 miles in 2:25 as:

-14 miles easy to steady in 1:42:30 (7:22 / mile)

-5 miles tempo in 29:50

-1.5 mile cooldown

Obviously a 29:50 5 mile tempo run is nothing to scream about, but I’m going to anyway, for two reasons. First, it’s a minute and twenty-five seconds faster than I have ever gone on this section of trail. My previous best was 31:15, also in perfect conditions, while peaking for Ironman Florida last fall. Second, I was, like, totally not working as hard as I could. I mean, if my left shoelace had been tighter I obviously would have run 24:30. Seriously.

I guess I’ve really only been writing about running lately, but I’ve been hitting the bike pretty hard as well and swimming well (for me) despite a lack of time in the pool. Here’s a great bike workout you might try if you’re into this sort of thing (warning, you need to have some concept of “steady” to do this workout. this is about 20-25 beats below threshold for me, but ymmv):

Warmup 10 minutes
2 x (45 minutes steady (LT – 20bpm), 15 minutes pretty hard (LT – 10 bpm))
Cooldown 5 minutes
Lie on floor.

In practice I find this to be roughly as taxing as a half-ironman bike ride. Try it out. You may want to go just once through the set your first time. Or if you’re tougher than me, which is likely, you could go three or four times.