The Track

I went to the track and ran intervals last night.  Honestly I don't remember the last time I went to a track and did that.  I'm pretty certain this was a 2011 first, and I didn't go much last year.  Really I haven't done much fast stuff since I hurt my IT Band in October 2009.  Before that I ran intervals nearly weekly.

The decline in interval work started as a way to not re-injure myself.  I found I kind of liked skipping them though.  I ran hills, because our trails aren't flat, ran hard up Towers every other week, ran tempo runs on the road fairly often, it's not like I totally ignored speed.  Running a lot of miles you can fake it relatively well, as long as you aren't trying to bang out a sub-3 hour marathon or something crazy like that.  I ran a 5K PB last April on no speed work, for example.  But I haven't been running a lot of miles recently.  And faking it is getting tougher.  My T&H 5K last weekend, even without the missed turn, was not a PB.  Was not within 3 minutes of a PB.

My Tuesday evening runs have me starting 1/2 mile from the CSU track, and I got a little push by Alex mentioning he was doing some 800s yesterday, so I did it.  I went to the track.  And it wasn't as bad as I remembered.  I started small, 2x400, 4x800, and 2x400 last night.  Faster than I normally run for sure, but I probably can take off 15-20 seconds from my 800s with a little more focus and grit.  I plan on keeping the Tues night intervals on the schedule, hopefully the speed comes back as fast as I remember it does.  Someday next May I'll be running down the Poudre Canyon and I'll look back on last night and think, "that was a good idea".  Right?