Surprise!

Everyone is out of town for Thanksgiving today, so the gym is closed up. Instead of bench day, this is off day.

Which leads to this observation: since there was no activity this morning, and I got a good night’s sleep, my body feels rested, ready, and fueled. Nothing hurts. Nothing aches. Nothing is stiff.

In other words, I’m recovered. Solid workout on the track on Sunday, followed by a solid deadlift day, followed by a good rest day—and voila!

I plan to give the track a go on Thursday, and may try to get a freebie at a strange gym Friday or Saturday, followed by track work on Sunday. So, my volume should be about what it always is. But the key takeaway here is that my Wednesday off demonstrates my regimen is probably about right. In the absence of a hard weight training session, my body is recovered.

Nice.

Part 2

Except that we released work early today, 3:00 p.m., for Thanksgiving. It was a beautiful day. The temperature was perfect.

So I did a quick tempo/interval workout on the lacrosse oval (asphalt) at Rock Springs.

              4 p.m., 66 degrees

             400 meter warmup, dynamic stretches, drills

              4 x 330 meters, 180 cadence, 90 seconds on, 90 seconds rest (7:18 pace)

              4 x 100 meters, striders, 200 cadence

I’m continuing to work with the metronome and the Gym Boss, trying with the former to get my tempo right and using the latter to work on conditioning.  There will come a time (soon) when I commit to track work and will use the Gym Boss to time 200 meter intervals (e.g., 15 for the first 100, 15 for the second).

This tempo translates to about a 1:50 400 meter pace, not too bad for early in the season, general conditioning session, at least for me. The interesting thing to me is that the three metronome sessions, set at 180, have timed to 9:30, then 8:00, then 7:18 mile paces. What this tells me is that I’m getting more athletic with this tempo and my stride length is getting longer. The intervals today, if you kept that pace up over 1500 meters, would be a 6:49, and that’s pretty close to my goal race in the pentathlon.

Training volume today was about 2100 meters, including the warmup.