A Final Speed Day Pre-TC 10 Mile

Last Friday my legs were feeling A-OK after the Square Lake Sprint Triathlon from 12 days before. (Here's my race report and here are more photos from that tri.) So I headed out to do that same 5x (3 mins HARD / 3 mins MODERATE) that I did 3 weeks before. I don't usually like to do the same speed workout so close, but 3 weeks ago it was just a quick random workout, and last week it was a workout that Coach Jen had me do around the same time before the 2010 TC 10 Mile when she was my coach. As I said a few weeks ago, this workout is one that looks fine but is harder than you might expect because there's no EASY - you don't get to recover because your non-hard efforts are still MODERATE.

After a short warm-up, here were my efforts (HARD in red, and MODERATE in orange):

My split were similar to last time:

- 0.54 for both 1st splits
- 0.53 for both 2nd splits
- 0.52 instead of 0.53 for the 3rd split (slower this time)
- 0.54 instead of 0.51 for the 4th split (faster this time - a nice difference!)
- 0.48 instead of 0.44 for the 5th split (again, noticeably faster this time!)

(That last split was shorter because it was all up Marshall Hill coming up from the Mississippi River - a brutal end to the workout.)

The "build" at the end of the workout this time was promising!

And the "moderate" efforts were the same or better this time: SAME for the 1st, 0.01 farther for the 2nd and 3rd and 4th, and then 0.03 farther for the 5th, but I kinda screwed that one up and started walking thinking I was done this time, so after 0:30 seconds I started running again and tacked on 0:30 on the end (so those final 2 moderates of 0.40 and 0.08 need 0.04 of walking subtracted, so I went 0.44 after a short walk break instead of 0.41 a few weeks ago).

Pace graph. The first 4 efforts are pretty clear, and then the 5th is hard to see as it
was uphill. And then I started to walk when I should have been doing 3:00 moderate yet.


My foot strikes show the 5 efforts pretty clearly (and me walking in red down low).


Very similar look to last time, but this one is FASTER (REDDER) between split 10 and 12!

And JUST MAYBE the reason why this workout was faster was because last time I had just inhaled a large cinnamon roll about an hour before doing that workout. Oops. This workout had efforts that were much more consistently red, vs last time had some more random green and orange paces in my harder efforts as well.

Alright, now to see if any of this will translate to a fast TC 10 Mile THIS WEEKEND. My Saturday post will have some pre-race thoughts/goals/predictions.