Let’s follow up yesterday’s sort of serious post about “listening to your body” with something lighter, eh?

Last night I ran my heart out, and it was awesome.

Wait, one more because Jen somehow got cropped out.

My buddy and coach Jess was coaching, and her workout for the group happened to be exactly what she had on my schedule. So sneaky.

We met at the E. 66th Street Lululemon and ran approximately .8 to the park to warm up.

It was nearly 7pm, and dark, when we got to the park, so we started at the bottom of the Great Lawn, smack dab in the middle, and ran up to the top, which is .25 a mile. We’d run up counter-clockwise to recover, and run all-out on the clockwise. Six times.

I fumbled with my Garmin as I started, and I ended up further back in the pack than I would have liked to have been and the super-competitive side of me got really frustrated. How did so many people get ahead of me? By the second 400 though, I looked over and saw Gia next to me and my perspective suddenly changed. Wait, Gia? Running even with me? She’s FAST!

Splits: 1:20, 1:19, 1:19, 1:18, 1:19, 1:18 — that’s a pace of 6:09ish!! When I saw that after the first one, I was very very happy. I only timed the 400s, so I don’t know our times or mileage total, but Ashley‘s DailyMile says we ran about 4, and that sounds about right.

As we ran out of the park on our cooldown, I chatted with Jess and told her that I didn’t like her very much this week. I had a really crappy tempo run on Monday, and last night’s workout was killer. “Good,” she said. “You should hate me this week.” (The race is in two weeks.)

What’s your favorite kind of speedwork? As painful as 400s or 800s are–and moreso, the recovery–I like them a lot better than trying to hold a tempo pace for miles at a time.

Sometimes when I don’t post for a day or two, it means I have literally nothing to say. Sometimes when I don’t post, it’s because I’m busy and don’t have time to post. This is the latter case.

Since I haven’t actually talked a ton about fitness on this fitness blog lately, let’s start with that.

I definitely went through a long workout slump after the marathon. Work was crazy and, honestly, I’d lost some motivation. This was part of the reason I started using Jess as a running coach. I knew I wanted to try for a PR at the D.C. Half, but I didn’t know if I had it in myself to push myself and I needed some accountability.

Knowing I have to “report” to Jess has definitely helped, and my fitness levels are getting back to where they used to be.

Friday, I had some pain in the arch of my left foot (mild plantar fascitis?), so I decided to spin instead of run. A few months back, I took a Flybarre class and bought a credit for a Flywheel class, too, knowing that if I didn’t use it right away, once I finally used it, it’d feel like a free class since I wasn’t paying then!

I don’t spin often, so it felt hard, but as you can see above, I performed better than I did the last time I went! Higher average speed, higher power, longer distance. I was really happy when I logged in and saw that Friday.

Saturday morning, Jess was hosting run club at the E. 66th Street Lululemon, and the scheduled workout for the day was a 10K time trial…which just so happened to be the workout she had put on my schedule. Sneaky, that Jess is. My stomach has been a little off lately, so I had some Ucan before I left. I learned my lesson about underfueling a few weeks ago, that’s for sure.

Jess said that the 10K time trial was for us to use as an assessment of where our fitness is, and to run it at race pace. We ran the .8 to the park and ran the Joe Kleinerman 10K route. My Garmin had died, and I borrowed Jess’, so I don’t remember my exact splits, but I remember looking down in the first mile and seeing I was running a 7:30 or 7:40-something mile. That first mile felt really hard, and when I looked at the watch, I understood why. I dialed it back a bit after that, and was running around 8:10ish pace until, about 2 miles in, I had to stop to tie my shoe. I think the stop probably took about 30 seconds or so, and my pace after that never got faster than 8:30s.

My final time ended up being 52:51, an 8:31 pace, and just about 30 seconds off of my 10K PR. I felt like death on Cat Hill and not awesome on the flats, but, hey, I felt awesome on the downhills! I think with a little more rest and a little bit less wine, I would have felt better and run faster. While inputting this time into various race calculators doesn’t indicate a half PR for me, Jess thinks I can do it, so I’m going to go with that.

Thoughts on race calculators? Do you think they are accurate at predicting race times? I don’t think they’re always particularly accurate, but that doesn’t stop me from playing with them.

(If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can input a race time, and the calculator will spit out what your time might be at an equivalent effort. Jack Daniels and McMillan are two popular ones.)