'Speed' night at Reagan High School

I was honked at by a Smart car yesterday for the first time. It sounded just like our dog biting a squeaky toy.  And while I am generally not amused to be honked at (nobody is of course), this time I let it go.  It was just too funny a sound.  Had I hit the diminutive automobile of course I would have had a ready-made excuse.  "I never saw you!  Really!"  And this time trust me it would have been the truth. 

Kathleen and I re-started the weekly Thursday evening speed work program at Reagan High School in the Heights, last night.  It was just the two of us at first and then a couple more Striders - John and Azita - showed up.  Ordinarily we have a good little group of about 10 to 15 runners mixing it up with various permutations of intervals & repeats, Kenyan relays, time trials and what not.  Last night we settled for 5 X 800 meter repeats, so-called Yasso 800's.  The theory is that given adequate training for a marathon, if you can run 10 X 800 meter repeats with a short rest interval, each in as many minutes as you plan to run your marathon in hours, you are ready for the race.  So for example if your goal marathon pace is 4:00 hours, you should be able to run all 10 the 800 meter repeats in 4 minutes or less.  As they say, your mileage may vary: it does not work for everybody but is a good workout nonetheless.  The important thing to remember is that adequate preparation for a marathon involves much more than running 800 meter repeats on a track: you need to pile up the miles - anything less than 40 miles per week really won't cut it in my opinion - and you need to do those long runs.

Anyway we did not do 10 repeats as we do not have any marathons planned.  We do have a 5K tomorrow morning so didn't want to overdo it on the track just two days prior.