The Michigan

There is no such thing as an "appropriate pace" for this workout. You do it as fast as you can.

wolverinesrun wrote:

There is no such thing as an "appropriate pace" for this workout. You do it as fast as you can.

so after they PR the 3200 what do they do?

@wolverinesrun: Related question: Do you happen to know the route used for hill repeats in the Arb? (To acknowledge the obvious, I'm a nothing-special runner at UM, who read Chris Lear's book and am curious precisely where they were going in this workout.) I've always assumed it was something like this:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4121852

Can you confirm, deny, or give me any more info on this? Thanks. And Go Blue.

No that is not the one from the book. The start is correct, but you need to stay on the main path all the way until the Geddes road entrance/exit. It is roughly 1000m long (more like 960m). The one you mapped out can be more useful however, as you can make the recovery shorter, by taking the shortcut down the ridge/stairs. To jog back down the whole 1000m hill takes roughly 4 1/2 mins.

Yeah where you are turning right, you actually need to turn left and follow up to geddes road as the originial poster said. Then once you are up at Geddes, you can turn left and run to Harvard Pl, where the men do hills in the winter. That's a very tough hill as well.

The hill you mapped is done by the women's team occasionally, although when you get to the "top" instead of turning left towards campus, you turn right and the rest is a very short downhill back to the start.

Ah, got it. Thank you to both, distant memory and gobluer, for the clarification. Seems like staying on the main path all the way up to Geddes would get you a more consistent elevation gain all the way up; what I linked to is up for the first 2/3 or so, but then it's (close to) flat for the final stretch around the entrance garden. Up to Geddes would be more consistently up, and probably has more total elevation gain than my version.

Of course, there's the recovery aspect as well, and how easy it is to get back to the start. In which case the women's route/stairs back down has its appeal.

Thanks again. I really appreciate it; had wondered about this for a few years now.

Inspiration?

also, when i did it for fun I ran 9:30, 4:37, 2:14 and was 14:44 the next week for a track 5k.

To 907:

We would also occasionally run a shorter version of Arbs as well that start just east (by about 15m) of the bottom, run to the near top on Geddes near a shed/house if I remember correctly. We would run 4 long ones with 3 short reps in between as an alternate workout. You can't see it on the gmap, but it's about same grade but just shorter in length.

Very Nice and Go Blue!

@ Hunt House - yes, I know the shed you're describing. Between that and your description of that route as same grade but shorter in length, I can figure that out as well.

Thanks all for your thoughts. Go Blue. (We can *totally* win at Penn State next weekend, by the way.)

At the risk of being sort of a jerk, I'm tempted to note that a thread about running at Michigan, with primarily respondents from Michigan, has been marked by civility, full sentences with capital letters, and helpful, apposite responses. Go Blue indeed.