85 Days, 20 hours to go...
Is it just me, or is every Friday now the hottest, most humid day of the week? That was my first thought while strolling outside to grab the newspaper this morning. Munching on a banana, I stared up at the sky, whose hazy face looked like a series of dark smudges mixed with lighter ones. It'd be exaggerating to say it felt like walking through a steamy locker-room, but only just. In any case, conditions for today's workout weren't going to be much better than last week.
At about 8:00am I walked down to the cinder track, completing a warm-up and drawing a line in the cinders to serve as a start. The ideas was to do 6x800m in a Yasso-800 manner. I changed a few things from last week, just to see if they'd make a difference. First, I didn't do dynamic stretches during warm-up. This is because I've noticed that every time I stretch (dynamic or static) before a workout or race, my legs feel loose but exceptionally heavy. I'm not sure why this is, but it makes some sense given newer research I've seen concerning stretching and lower power-output. Indeed, one instructor at the USA Track and Field coaching seminar mentioned that when he worked with NFL players, many said after stretching that it took about 25 minutes of game time to get rid of the "heavy-legs" feeling. Bearing all this in mind, I decided to do my usual run-a-few-minutes-walk-a-few-minutes warm-up without stretching.
The second thing I did differently was start in the shade. This seemed to help a lot, because I felt cooler after each interval, and had cooler water to drink as well.
On the whole, the workout came off well. I finished all six intervals, and felt good. The splits went as such--3:22, 3:19, 3:16, 3:16, 3:15, 3:10. Unlike last week, I felt stronger as the workout went on, and managed to keep the same effort throughout.
The idea today was just to stay under control and find a good rhythm (and of course, to have fun :)...). It's a good boost of confidence, particularly since it happened under such humid conditions, and since during last week's effort everything felt like a struggle. To have it work better today felt good, and I'm looking forward to another week of training. 85 days, 20 hours to go.
Happy Friday, friends :)
P.S. Some dehydration observations I began today.
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