Hey guys. Sorry, didn't get a chance to check in after I got home from the meet last night. Unfortunately, the mile went really poorly. Meet was exactly 1 hour behind when she started her warmup, but they managed to make up roughly 15 mins by combining some heats so the 50 minutes we allotted for warmup, stretching, drills etc ended up only being 35 mins. Shouldn't have been a killer, but she was pretty flustered walking up to the line because she didn't get to go through her normal routine. Combine that with the fact that she was very intimidated about trying to run what amounted to a match race against a girl who ran 503 2 weeks ago and her state of mind on the starting line was definitely not where it needed to be. The race ended up only having 6 runners and none of the other 4 broke 5:50. The plan coming in was pretty simple, stick with the elite girl for at least 1200 meters. She went out with the her through 400, (74) then coming out of the first turn of the 3rd lap, she let her open up a small gap that turned into 15 meters within the next half lap. My girl hit the 800 at 2:36. With 200 left I told her to cruise it in because she was over 100 ahead of 3rd place and there was no chance to run under 520 so I wanted to save as much as possible for the 800 in a couple of hours. Ended up running a 529 for the full mile. Obviously very disappointing. The 503 girl ran what should have been perfect splits for us (74, 2:30) so it wasn't an issue of the pace being incredibly fast. She said that once the other girl got a few meters away from her, she felt a big let down and couldn't push herself. Obviously mental toughness is an important aspect of running the 1600 though so she is going to have to learn to deal better with adversity as we move forward.
After her cool down, we talked about it for a while and I tried to stress the fact that this would be a learning experience and the best thing she could do was to put it out of her mind and focus on preparing for the 800 in 2 hours. In the 800, there were 3 girls entered with 215 seed times so we were expecting a really quick pace. As it turned out, only 1 of the 3 top girls showed up. My girl got boxed a little by some of the slower runners who tried to go out with the leaders, but fell off the pace early. 2 girls separated from the pack by about 5-8 meters at the 300 mark and split roughly 67. She did a nice job of not panicking though and got out of the pack and ended up splitting roughly 68 low. She put in a big move to catch the leaders around the 500 mark and went straight to the lead. She was able to open up a 2-3 meter gap by the 600 mark, but the 215 girl managed to run her down in the last 60 meters. Ended up running 219.3 which was a 1.6 second PR over last spring. She said she felt really good up until the last 100 meters so that was encouraging. With a faster 400 split, I think 217 high or a little faster would have been easily doable which is even more encouraging considering we haven't done any work geared specifically towards the 800. More than anything else, I was really pleased that she was able to shake off such a bad performance from earlier in the day.
The plan going forward is a light workout on new years day and then to take another shot at the 1600 in a time trial this friday. After that, regardless of the outcome, she's going to take a break because she has been training really hard since June. Hopefully everything will click and she can run under 5:10 and we can send the video out for coaches to review. My thought at this pont is that we'll be more conservative than the last time trial and shoot for a 2:32-2:34 800 split.
Anyone have ideas for the light workout on new years day? Our workout last wednesday was 4x300 @ 75 second 400 pace off 330-4 mins rest, 4x200 w/ the first 2 at 37 and the next 2 at 34 off 3 mins rest, then a couple of 150m strides starting off really easy and building into a sprint the last 40-50 meters. I felt like that was a good light sharpening up workout, but I'd certainly be open to suggestions.
Thanks again to everyone who has made a useful contribution over the last 5+ weeks in this thread. Hopefully I'll have better news to report later this week and we can wrap this thread up on a high note.