Tag: speedwork

Eat the elephant one bite at a time 

I started my run on Sunday morning, and I wasn’t more than 20 steps in when I began to hear the voices. My legs are really sore. Why does this feel so hard if I’m running so slow? How am I going to do today’s workout feeling like this? Was that noise my joints popping?!  Ugh. It’s windy.  You know these voices, right? I bet you’ve heard them a time or a hundred. The day before, I had ridden four hours at a base ironman effort – but with a series of FTP intervals interspersed throughout. Fifty-five minutes worth of …

The Turtle Hunts The Hare: Journeys in Finding Speed, Part 2

2

Ya’ll, trying to get this endurance turtle to become a speedy hare is hard work. Right about now, I’m am cussing myself out for letting what snippets of speediness I had go by the wayside as I trained long, and then longer still over the past two years. Over the past several weeks, I’ve dabbled in the “delights” of shorter course racing with one sprint triathlon ( and one olympic-equivalent 7-stage triathlon (Survival of the Mills). These were fun, local races and I was able to race well. Survival of the Mills, in particular, was an incredibly fun race that mixed trail runs with …

What I Learned From a Return to Sprint Triathlon

4

I like to talk a big game about “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable” and “the magic happens outside of your comfort zone” and all the related platitudes of that ilk. But, do I walk that talk? While I won’t say I’ve completely mastered being comfortable with the discomfort of endurance pain, I know I can take a long course licking and keep on ticking. My nickname isn’t Midget Tank for no reason. What I’m not very good at – not good even a little bit – is anything at or even near my threshold. The so-called “red-line.” No, I much …

Going From “How far?” to “How fast?”: Part 2 – Running

  Setting a goal to run a new distance may cause uncertainty: Can I really run [insert your dream distance here]? Then, as training progresses, we start to realize, “Oh yes, I CAN run that far. But, hmmmm, I wonder how fast I can do it?” It’s a natural and possibly inevitable progression: moving from how far to how fast. In my previous post, I talked about two key workouts for improving speed: tempo efforts and repeats (intervals), and discussed how these basic workouts apply to cycling. This post is the second part of that discussion, and applies speed strategies …