A Callousing Workout

I believe Dellinger uses "callousing workout" to describe a lot of the workouts that he has his runners do, and I must admit, I like it. I have pretty limited knowledge on all the physiological concepts when it comes to running, but the one thing that I do know, is that you have to hurt every once in a while in training to really be prepared for those last few miles of a marathon. It can't all be nice and easy. For me, mile repeats are where I get my callouses.

The plan was to do 10 miles total with 5X1 mile worked in the middle. The way I do these mile repeats is I go to a park by my house that has a .4 mile asphalt loop around it. It also has each .1 mile measured out, so it's nice to do any type of interval work there since you can pretty much come pretty close to any distance with the help of the markers. Well, actually I guess quarters would be kind of tough since there are only markers every .1 miles, but I'm not a big fan of quarters anyway, so that's just fine with me.

I try and keep the rest interval pretty short for these, with the thinking that the smaller the rest interval the more it relates to marathon training. So, basically, I do two and a half loops around the park for my mile, and then jog the .2 mile back to the starting line for the next one. In all it works out to about a 2-3 minute rest. If I was specifically training for a 5K, I would probably be better served lengthening the rest and really pushing the miles, but this way, I kind of look at it as a tempo/interval mix. I guess they're what McMillan would call cruise intervals.

I was pretty happy with the way today went down. I did the first one in 5:23, and what I realized is that when I was done, I was almost instantly recovered. My breathing was back to normal after a few seconds and I was ready to go. I would assume the quick recovery is related to the tempo runs I've been doing. I've been doing my tempo runs a little shorter than I have in past years, but faster as well, so the quick pace on the mile repeats wasn't a total shock to the system. From there I got faster and did the 5 miles as follows: 5:23, 5:18, 5:19, 5:20, 5:23. I came through the first half mile on every repeat in 2:39-2:40 with the expception of the last one, where I was at 2:43. I kind of lost concentration on the first half of that last one. I guess that happens when you're wiped out. And I was pretty wiped out from this one. I've only done this workout once this year so far, about 2 months ago, and my times were about 5 seconds slower per mile last time than they were today. Actually, this is the first time I've ever gone sub 5:20 for a mile in one of these workouts, and I did this almost every week last year (although I didn't always do 5). I guess progress is being made.

Now if I can just get this picture out of my mind, I will be fine. It has haunted me ever since I first saw it yesterday. Mmmm…Pizza.