My 20:20 Journey Begins

A few days ago, I wrote about my journey this year to achieve a goal for a 5K race of 20:20.  I began my journey with my first 200-200-400 set, but the sections that I picked were a little odd, insofar as they had some portions with downward inclines.  I marked off some sections the other day that also had a slight decline, but that's somewhat by choice.  I want to retrain my legs to run fast, a 1% downward grade isn't that significant, but certainly doesn't hurt my desire to train my legs to run faster.  Today, after a patient warm up, taking extra time and attention to my right high hamstring (which has still been a little tight and even somewhat sore back and forth), I did a short warm up jog and got to the section of road for my first set.

Today I did two sets of (200-200-400) with the 200m sections being run at about 5:20/mile pace.  The 400's were run right around 5:40 pace.  If I look at various run calculators, These paces for these intervals put me on target for my goal.  Numbers don't lie, but the body still has to perform.  This is my second round of this workout, and I was able to complete two sets today.  That's already progress.  Clearly, the goal will be to do multiple sets. In the spirit of getting close to 5K volume, I would anticipate getting up to 6 sets.  I might have tried a third set today, but felt like my paces would possibly have dropped off, and so I finished still feeling relatively fresh, which is the idea.

The good news is that my first full attempt at this workout actually had me hitting paces that would ultimately put me at running a 5K in under twenty minutes.  I'm not going to get too excited about this, however.  What matters is that I've got a starting point, and it's something that I can build on.

The other key to my training is to do it rested.  While I was training for Ironman, it was almost a badge of honor to do workouts while fatigued.  As I train for a 5K, it will be the opposite.  I'll want to be doing my workouts well rested so as to maximize their value.  I feel like I've gotten off to a good start on my 20:20 journey.  We'll see what's next.