Trackside

I realise that this will be the biggest jinx ever, but I’ve had an excellent weeks training so far. Everything has gone to plan and I’ve not had any troubles from my dodgy Achilles *touches wood*. I’ve felt it fleetingly on runs, but I came to the conclusion that it was mostly psychosomatic and if I didn’t let it bother me, it wouldn’t.

Saturday’s session called for some threshold running and some 400m repeats. That sounded like track work to me, so I took the plunge and went for my second ever session training at Wavertree track.

The scene of this morning's crimes against running

 

 A club mate had said he would join me, which I was glad of, especially so as when I arrived Liverpool Harriers people were training. D’oh! I’d completely not thought that they might be there. The coach Tony and James C, who came up to Ribble Valley with me, and a few others. Of course, we each let each other to do our own thing, but I half expected someone to shout across the track “What are you doing Hawkins, that technique is shocking!” In some ways, it was good actually, as when I heard Tony shouting instructions to his runners, they acted as pointers for me – things like relaxation and making it feel easy. 

Myself and Deano found ourselves using Lane 7 & 8 – the session was relentless, after 6 minutes of threshold there were two sets of 6x400m at 5K pace with 60s recovery. And they just kept coming. I worked as smartly as I could, staying relatively relaxed. I find 5K pace strange on a track, as when I review my times, it’s always faster than my 5K times! Deano (an amazing runner) was just starting back from some time-out/injury and so made a graceful exit after putting down some work and I carried on. 

When dealing with multiple reps like that, I find you just have to break it down into its simplest components. I think the things I am learning in races are starting to trickle through and shape how I approach my training. I’m finding that I’m becoming much more focused in my running. Nothing else outside matters, other than the Rep I’m currently doing. If you can block everything else out, it means less to worry about and more focus on the work. The fact that others were running round the track at a much faster speed than me didn’t matter, they were doing a different session to me.  I even found a little mantra for myself as I was going round “make it easy for yourself, so it’s hard for everyone else” Little phrases like that really help my relaxation.

Eventually it was all over (after a second lot of Threshold running). Including warm ups/downs/recovery jogs it was 8 miles of track work – a good day at the office in anyone’s book. I was so pleased I’d chosen the track, its great to mix up the types of training. As much as I enjoy my usual routes, I need to get out of my comfort zone and there is nothing more honest than the track.

If you’ve never used a track before, give it a go. I think you’ll be surprised about how much you enjoy it.

Now just 2 ½ hours to do tomorrow….