Greetings, Masters. Looking fwd to watching track nationals today instead of weather updates [DC storm coverage preempted most of it Saturday]. fun week of running for me. 69 miles incl.
4 at half-marathon pace (25:22) and 1 X 3:00 uphill similar effort Mon.
3200 in 11:14.37 Thurs.
Two weeks ago on here I got lots of helpful input for 2-mile (target 11:20) scheduled for Friday. It was postponed to August, so I decided to hold a by-invitation-only 3200 Thursday 9:00 am at American U. No online registration, no t-shirts, and as it happens I was the only one who showed up. Some would call it a time trial I guess.
Everything was as you said -- timing my strides to lock in 21 sec/100 helped prevent going out too fast. Even pacing (5:37/5:37) helped. Waiting to 400 rather than 800 out to unleash the hounds was a good idea (you could smell the rubber track burning as I dialed it down from 85 to 83 lap 7 to 8), and there was traffic to deal with.
The lapped people were not runners but gangs of pedometer-challenge-participating walkers. Took a few tries, but by the end of the race I think I had successfully promoted the idea that "track one!" is shorthand for "weird guy from Psych. dept. who races imaginary friends coming thru; please adjust your position to avoid collision".
About 18 meters short of 2-mile of course, and maybe 15 degrees cooler in am than scheduled evening race time, but then again no competition, and had to duck out to lane 3 and back to 1 on each back straight to avoid a construction project, so all told I thought it was roughly a fair 2-mile test.
Race director awarded me a blueberry muffin and some greek yogurt for winning the M50-54 age group.
thanks for all the great input, and have a terrific week,
Dave