I finally got my season started last weekend at the Cardinal Invitational at Stanford. I ran the 5000 and ran pretty much just like I thought I would. I was a little nervous going in because I was pretty short on actual 5k work, but figured it wouldn’t be too fast and that I could probably just sit in and get pulled along. I ran 13:31 but the last 600 showed that I’m not quite back to being ready to really race yet. But it was a lot better than anything I did last year and I feel good about being able to race with good runners again. Plus it was fun to race at my home track and see a bunch of friends from college.
After the Cardinal Invitational I came back up to Mammoth (most of us were in San Diego during April) to get in a couple more weeks at altitude to get ready for the last push before nationals. My next race will be next weekend at the Adidas Track Classic in Carson. I’m gong to run a 1500 there, which I’m really excited about. My 1500 PR is 3:43 so I’m looking forward to lowering that to something a little better.
It might seem counterintuitive to come up to 8000’ for the two weeks before a fast 1500, but I think it’s going to work pretty well. I think there’s a misconception about the sort of training that you can do at altitude. From my experience, the only type of training that’s really hard to do up here is pure 5k pace workouts. For example it would be very hard to run 3 or 4 times a mile at 5k pace. But it’s not hard to get in some really good quality workouts at mile pace or faster up here. For example, I had 6-8 times 400m last week and they were all faster than mile pace and I finished in 52, which is moving pretty good for me. Of course, there was a big tailwind which helped a lot, but my body didn’t know that, so it tried to adapt to running fast 400s. Besides using the wind to help us run fast sometimes we run intervals on a slight downhill in order to make sure we hit fast paces like we would at sea level. In fact, on Thursday I ran 1:49 for 800m! (maybe it was a little short and a bit downhill, but it was still fast!) My point isn’t to try to impress anyone with the workouts I’ve been doing up here, it’s just to say that next time somebody tries to tell you they’re not ready to race because they’ve been at altitude you can call BS on that.
Despite what I just said, after the Adidas meet I’ll be back down in San Diego until nationls. The reality is that I need to be on a track and get in some 5k specific workouts that are hard to do in Mammoth. Maybe I can even talk Ryan into jumping in some workouts with me, if he didn’t get too slow from the marathon training!
