Archive for September, 2009

Run Track Workouts Anywhere

With a GPS running watch, any road, path, or trail can be the perfect place to run your next speed session.  I live near a quiet sidestreet that is about a mile long and doesn’t have many houses.  This is perfect for my intervals and repeats.
You will no longer need to rely on the track for these workouts as you can set the watch for specific distances and see how far you have gone. For example, I will often run a half mile interval followed by a timed recovery. The Garmin Forerunner can be set to beep as your interval begins and then again as you hit the half mile mark. I especially enjoy that the watch logs the time and distance so that I can look back on my workout results.
With the Garmin giving accurate distances, any type of speed work that was previously measured and timed on the track can now be done anywhere.

Maintain an Even Heart

As an alternative to the workout “Keep an Even Pace”, this workout is geared towards maintaining an even heart rate. I like to do this workout during recovery runs and try to keep my heart rate in a specific zone or within a percentage of my max heart rate.
This is not as easy as it seems and will force you to either go slower or faster to stay within that zone. I like to do this on recovery runs to force myself to slow down to my easy pace so that I can be ready for my hard workouts and avoid turning my easy days into a race.

Keep an Even Pace

As you head out on a long run, try to maintain a steady pace for as even splits as possible. The goal is to finish your run and see your pace line on the Garmin Training Center graph be perfectly flat. Make sure to give yourself a window of acceptability. For example, the first time that I did this particular workout, I tried to keep it within a 10 second window of my goal pace. After a couple times of doing this workout, you will find it easier to make that window smaller and smaller.
Obviously, it will help not to run in an area with lots of traffic or stop lights where you would have to continually slow down, stop, etc.
For added difficulty, tray to maintain these even splits while running up and over hills. This will have you pushing up to maintain the pace, but will force you to take it easier on the way down.
This type of workout will teach you how to maintain even splits throughout a race or workout and how it feels to hold that pace for an extended period of time. Specifically with longer races, it will force you to train to run the last miles at the same pace as when you started your run.