Back on Track

Today I went out and completed my first full track workout. It might be more beneficial to do some hill repeats, but I'm not sure how my knee would hold up. So I headed out to Lehigh University's track this afternoon.

Things went great today, much better than I expected actually. I planned on doing 400 meter repeats (1/4 mile each). The goal was to complete 6 of them and I was able to do so successfully. I wanted to start off somewhat slow through the first three of them to make sure I was good to go in the final three. It worked out well, but I might've even been too slow.

I felt really good through the 4th one and picked up the pace. I decided to try to finish hard on the 5th and 6th ones. That worked well for the 5th one, but I didn't have much left in the tank at the end of the 6th. I pushed, but sort of stumbled home.

I think I did a really good job of picking the amount of recovery time in between repeats. It got tricky at the end though as some high school girls were doing 200 meter repeats with their coach. Between the final two runs of my workout, I might've rested too long. I was waiting to get a clear run with the girls out of the way. After being strong throughout, my legs felt like jelly on the last run.

I felt like I pushed relatively hard. Of course, running by myself, I am just naturally slower than if I had others to work with. I probably should've pushed even more, but really there's no need to do so this early in the game.

I stretched a lot and hopefully won't be sore tomorrow. My knee did start acting up after the last run, but was fine following the cool down. I guess I picked the correct number of repititions to do. On a couple of the runs, the wind was in my face bothered me a little bit at the start. I think next time I do a track workout, I'll do ladders to give myself more of a challenge.

Hopefully I recover well enough tomorrow. I plan to take it easy and only run around my old neighborhood twice (about 2 miles total). I weighed myself after the run today. Obviously that is the lightest I'll be, but I was still impressed when it came out as 170 pounds. I started off exactly a month ago at 180 pounds. That's a good start, but there is even more to go. I haven't gone crazy watching what I eat, but I have been careful and tried to cut back on unhealthy things. Clearly, that's helped a lot too along with this exercising.