Mile Repeats. See also, Death

**DISCLAIMER**

For some of you reading, you may or not get the sweats when I start to tell this story, or maybe even start to feel your stomach get funny like you might want to puke, or maybe you'll just run screaming from the room in terror of having to relive those days. Yes those days - Mondays.

Let me tell you a little story before I dive into my workout yesterday. When I was in college, I played lacrosse (and we were awesome, just sayin'). Since lacrosse is a spring sport, we had the entire fall season to be tortured practice and condition. Fall ball was fun - practices were hard but focused on team-building and learning "the system" and transitioning the new freshman into their new roles as peons college-level players. However, once fall ball ended, it was time to get down to business. 3 days a week for 6 weeks, we were put through high-intensity, lung-burning, vomit-inducing, can't-walk-up-OR-down-the-stairs workouts.

Mondays were especially bad. They were so bad, in fact, that we called them "Hell Mondays". (As if Mondays weren't bad enough in college, coming off of college football Saturday and pro football Sunday Funday. Oh wait, what's that you say? Seems like nothing has changed? Yes, you would seem to be correct.) And each year I was on the team they became progressively worse because my coach became progressively more sadistic until her boyfriend finally proposed and then she leveled off slightly.  Essentially, Monday was an hour of straight sprinting. Notice I didn't say "running", because there was no running involved. It was full on sprinting. And I'm not talking about 400 repeats with rest in-between, I'm talking 30/50/80/100 yard sprints in blocks of time even Usain Bolt would have trouble sustaining.

For an hour.

And then we lifted.

For an hour.

It was awful.

I'm pretty sure our coaches got some kind of weird, twisted joy in watching us die slow deaths on those Monday afternoons. There has to be some kind of gene mutation that allows for that degree of evilness. We did the math once - we ran more on Mondays than the track team ran THE ENTIRE WEEK OF PRACTICE. It's no wonder so many of us have gone on to be runners after college - we were pretty much on the track team to begin with.

This brings me up to my planned mile repeats yesterday - or, as I have started to call them, death. As I ambled out to the track, I couldn't help but think about those Hell Monday runs and figured that if I could get through those days, four mile repeats would be cake.

I was wrong.

They were also awful.

My plan was to go in running 7:00 miles. This is slower than 5k pace, but seeing as how I am aiming for an 8:00 mile pace in the marathon, 7:00 miles is a good speed workout. Contrary to popular belief, track work isn't about just bombing through the interval at whatever your fastest speed is. This will inevitably lead to awful splits and an inability to accurately judge your current work effort. More often than not, it also leads to crashing and burning in spectacular fashion. Which is precisely what I did yesterday.

Keeping in mind my planned pace was 7:00, here are my actual splits:

Mile 1: 6:40
Mile 2: 6:52
Mile 3: 6:58
Mile 4: 6:47

If this were a test, I would have failed miserably. Notice the progressive slide toward crashing and burning in miles 2 and 3. Had I been doing 5 repeats, I probably would have been well over the 7:00 mile pace on mile 4, and the only reason I went under yesterday was because it was my last one and I essentially forced myself to finish strong.

I guess I'm not as good at this whole "pacing" after all, but lucky for me I still have four more attempts at getting it right before November 3rd rolls around.

Tangent (because I have trouble running them): Either I can't run in a straight line - or between straight lines - or Alastair is giving me funny splits, because yesterdays miles were actually clocking in as being 1.07 miles. This is weird because, in reality, 4 laps around a track is NOT a mile, it is roughly 9.34 meters short of a mile. So the fact that I was getting a reading of OVER a mile is absurd and something I need to look into. If anyone else has had this problem in the past then let me know, but the splits I gave above were for my finishing times and not what Alastair considered my "mile" times.