16x200 on a Trail "Up North" on Vacation

My last post was about some MAJOR biking I did while up north with family last week. (And my post before that had more photos from up north, as well as notes from my BEST long run.) I mentioned in my biking post that I took it easy on Thursday because I had a hard interval workout on Friday. THIS is that workout:

16x200 done as 4x(4x200) with a 200 meter jog between the 200s and a 3:00 rest between the sets.

I've done this a number of times, starting 11 years ago when Coach Jen was helping me be fast before a 1 mile race. Last year at this time, I hit this workout hard on our local track. But I was up north away from a track, so I measured out about 0.125 on the trail and ran them back-and-forth:

I started ODDs over a culvert between 2 lakes, and ended the EVENs in the same spot.


A zoomed in section of that trail
(one "easy" line from my warm-up, and one from my cool-down heading home).

I tried to jog just over a minute between them, as that's what my "200 easy" between the intervals ended up being on the track. In the first Garmin image, that "easy running" is the blue on either end of the red intervals.

I knew I couldn't really compare these to times on the track, but I was just going to run these hard and try to descend the efforts like Coach Jen had told me to do on the track. Maybe I wouldn't be able to compare times from year-to-year, but I could still work hard.

I ran the first set hard (and was SUPER sweaty right away), and thought that I might not be able to drop times. (But I suppose THAT'S the way to run them!) The first set was all 35s with one 36. And then the second set was all 34s with one 35:

35.2, 1:07
35.1, 1:04
35.8, 1:01
36.2, 2:57 = 35.75 ave

34.2, 1:04
34.6, 1:04
35.0, 1:05
34.6, 2:59 = 34.60 ave

(The 2nd number in each row above is how long I was jogging easy between the efforts.)

AND THEN THE THIRD SET WAS ALL 33s WITH ONE 34! I was still dropping times! My 4th and final set was all out, and I still took off 0.2 sec overall from the average of the 3rd set, but I also slowed up on each 200 in the final set:

33.1, 1:08
33.9, 1:06
34.2, 1:04
33.7, 2:58 = 33.73 ave

33.0, 1:04
33.4, 1:06
33.8, 1:06
33.9, 2:11 = 33.53 ave

So I got my nice descend between all 4 sets of 35.75, 34.60, 33.73, and 33.53!

A year ago, I ran averages of 35.80 (FASTER NOW), 34.23 (FASTER THEN), 33.73 (EXACTLY THE SAME), and 33.23 (FASTER THEN). It's hard to know what that means as this was on a paved trail instead of on a track. FWIW, the intervals and rests were about half 0.12 miles and half 0.13 miles according to my Garmin (with only one being different at 0.14 miles), and looking back to last year's workout on the track, it had similar numbers: about half 0.12 miles and half 0.13 miles. So it's in the BALLPARK of being similar.

That being said, I've really been running strong (so many good long runs lately and 3 lifetime race PRs in April and May), so I would have hoped that these would have been maybe a BIT faster than last year's splits.

I have a big "A race" coming up this weekend! Back with pre-race thoughts on that shortly!!