Today was the first full day of Fall in Highlands, and as I began my warmup by running a mile or so up Chestnut Street and around the loop to Harris Lake, I could hear the acorns falling all around me. We have noticed that there are many more acorns this year and they are falling rapidly, but nobody is quite sure if this abundance of mast will actually foretell a hard winter or not. But it was definitely Fall - the first time it has dipped into the upper 40s at our house (49 by my thermometer this morning) as I did my Tai Chi on the deck.
As befits a new season, I was trying my new alternative to the discredited Yasso 800s - multiples of miles at 15 seconds or so faster than tempo pace. I figured that this pace, for me, would be 9:15 per mile, exactly midway between mile repeats and tempo miles. The workout, which is supposed to have been developed by Kevin and Keith Hanson over 20 years, calls for 2 X 6 mile with a 10-minute rest, and then another 2 X 6 mile (plus warmup and cool-down), a total of about 13 miles. As the Coach on the runner's website Runner Connect explained the workout:
"My favorite workout is the 2 x 6 mile, which was made famous by runners at the Hansons Olympic Development Project: 1 mile w/u, 2 x 6 miles @ 10-20 seconds faster than marathon pace w/10 min rest, 1 mile c/d. The purpose of this workout is to run at your threshold pace for a total of 12 miles, which will help you: (1) increase your ability to burn fat as fuel source when running at marathon pace; (2) practice running on tired legs; and (3) simulate the “dead leg” feeling many marathoners experience after 18 miles. Likewise, the goal of the 10 minute rest is to get your legs stiff, stagnant and uncomfortable to simulate how your legs will feel during the latter stag of the marathon.
This all sounded pretty reasonable (although I question the Hanson's insistence on a long run of no more than 16 miles). And also a good workout for a runner in his 20s, not in his 60s - a hell of a lot more ambitious than I could handle! So I decided to modify it to 2 x 2 miles, especially considering that I have 10 miles to run Thursday (including 8 at tempo pace).
The first two went well - I was 9:12 and then 9:03 - and I still felt strong and fluid after two hard miles. But midway through the second set, I began to feel that tightening in my upper right hamstring that I have felt from time to time this year. So what did this older and wiser marathon runner do? He decided to be uncharacteristically smart and deliberately stop at one mile (9:09) on the second set, cool down, and call it a day. Surely learning to train deliberately is the hardest thing for a runner to do - not to be sucked into a faster pace than you planned to do, or more miles. It's difficult sometimes to know the different between cutting a hard run off soon enough that you don't topple over the brink into injury, and simply "wimping out." I finished out with a long cool-down for a total of 7 miles. And I felt good about this new workout. It seemed to be slow enough that it did not enter the V02MAX zone that the Yassos were, I concluded, unnecessarily getting me into, but it still was a good hard threshold pace effort. Next time I will try both of the 2 x 2 miles and see how that feels. Or maybe even a 2 X 3 mile. The important change this year is that I am running more tempo miles (or slightly faster than tempo miles) and cutting down on overall mileage and VO2MAX workouts. And so far so good.
Every runner is an experiment of one. And as I told Karen on Saturday, I have never run a marathon before at the age of 65. I have nothing to compare it with. So we'll just see how it goes.
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