Good day of running on a special day

A good day of running on my 29th special day. I believe this is about the age in which most distance runners peak. Of course, that's if they've been running competitively since high school. I know for a fact that I have yet to peak. This is only my 7th year of running and I know I still have many years of fast running to come. Hopefully, fast running will mean low-2:3x marathons and possibly a sub-2:30. It's possible! However, it will take lots of hard work.

Today's workout was a stamina workout consisting of 7 x 1000 meters with 200 meter recovery, plus 3 x 200m fast with 200m recovery. Stamina workouts are meant to increase your lactate threshold, which allows you to run faster for a longer period of time. The run is more of a cruise interval workout than a speed workout because the pace is moderately hard. The goal is to get fatigue with the duration of the workout not the speed. After warming up for 33 minutes, I hit the track for the meat of the workout. The goal was 1k repeats in 3:18 - 3:21. 1st repeat - 3:19, 2nd repeat - 3:19. I'm thinking "wow, this doesn't feel too bad at all." That was the 2nd repeat and with only 200m recoveries, the legs will sure be feeling it shortly. I ended up running the last 5 repeats in 3:18, 3:17, 3:18, 3:15, & 3:15. The legs held up. The legs began to fatigue after the 7th and last repeat, and I still had the 200m repeats to do. I hit the 200s in 32, 34, 32. I was thinking of cutting my cool-down short because the legs felt beaten. As I went on my cool-down the legs got into a rhythm and ended up doing a 4-mile cool-down.

Tomorrow will be an easy day. Sunday will a key long run workout. The plan is to run 20 miles with the last 6 to 8 miles at goal marathon pace, which I'm thinking is about 5:55 - 5:59 pace.

Today's Runs: AM - 1:37:24 (14.8M); 7 x 1K w/ 200m recovery, plus 3 x 200m w/ 200m recovery; PM - 30:44; easy shakeout run mostly on grass. legs felt good.

Here's how the week went so far:
Monday: AM: 38:29 - easy run; PM: 42:28 steady easy run
Tuesday: 1:20:02 - steady run with 10 x 1 min. w/ 1 min. recovery in the middle of the run
Wednesday: 46:41 - easy run
Thursday: 1:13:25 - steady run with the last couple miles at 6:10 - 6:20 pace.