At the track last friday, doing a short speed workout with my wife. 3 10-11 year old kids see us running and as I’m cooling down a from 6:00 mile effort, start taunting me with “Hey OLD MAN, lets race OLD MAN, i’ll burn you OLD MAN, c’mon lets race OLD MAN”. I say “OK, how far do you want to race, because I normally don’t race on the track”. “One time around”. We take off. They are toast within 60 yards. I sprint the whole lap, and my wife comes around at the end while we’re all standing around. One of the kids says “errhm, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but, err, uhm, how come OLD PEOPLE like you guys can run faster than us?”.
My wife offers some down to earth advice about work and training, and I shout out “run far, run often” to them as they leave.
OLD MAN. Chortle.
The biggest consolation: I now have only 7 seconds and 5 days to get my 400m time down to Haile’s marathon pace before winter’s end (I promised Dev I would do this).
Since you are on the subject, I am doing track workouts for the first time this year with some friends. They all seem to know exactly what pace to run, but I have no clue. I’m in my mid-40s and can run a stand-alone 5K at slightly better than 6:00 per mile pace. Some of my friends say I should run repeats at that pace, but for individual 400m legs it seems slow. I can run 5:20 or 5:10 pace or maybe faster, but wonder if that is too fast to really do me any good. How do you know what pace is best for this type of training?
Thanks for your advice and for keeping the young ones honest.
Since you are on the subject, I am doing track workouts for the first time this year with some friends. They all seem to know exactly what pace to run, but I have no clue. I’m in my mid-40s and can run a stand-alone 5K at slightly better than 6:00 per mile pace. Some of my friends say I should run repeats at that pace, but for individual 400m legs it seems slow. I can run 5:20 or 5:10 pace or maybe faster, but wonder if that is too fast to really do me any good. How do you know what pace is best for this type of training?
Thanks for your advice and for keeping the young ones honest.
Great story…at least you were an “old guy”. If you had been 12 year old girl, they would have tried to erase this event from memory… Nothing’s worse for young boys than getting beaten by girls. I’m still scarred from getting beaten in the 2-mile my freshman year by a girl! Then, as you get older, it’s cool to get beaten by faster woman (at least for me). It’s kind of a bragging point. “Yeah, I was able to run the first half with elite woman. We had the helicopters and cameras all around us. It was pretty cool!”
Doesn’t that tell you what you can run it at now? What if you want to get faster…
No, it tells you the paces to run at based on your current fitness in order to get faster and provides a predication of what your time for various events could be…
Nice work, but shaving off 7 seconds in 5 days off a 400m time…you have your work cut out…old or young, that’s like taking an hour off your half IM time!
Yeah, but it was a bad day in many ways. I had already done a 2:42 800 and a 6:00 mile, and I was really feeling like crap in many ways. Having just a run a 1/2marathon PR (admittedly, i’ve only ever run 2 road standalone 1/2 marathons, but it was a 5-1/2min improvement on the same course), I think I’m ready for the Haile challenge before the official end of winter (March 21st). Shaving seconds doesn’t scale linearly either. Stay tuned
