a little speed work

This photo is of Olga Kaniskina of Russia, the winner of the gold medal in the women's 20k racewalk (photo from Jeff Salvage's excellent photo story at www.racewalk.com). I'm not even near as fast as her; she completed the 20k in 1:26:31, for about 4:20/km. To compare, my best 1k split from a recent 5k race was only 5:32! I can't even do ONE km as fast as she can do each km of a 20k race!

Oh, and another note. Joanne Dow of the USA, at age 44, was the oldest competitor in the women's 20k walk. The youngest competitors were only 18! Joanne has a daughter entering college this year who is about their age. Wow. I want to be like Joanne when I "grow up". I guess I still have 6 years to get as fast as her ;).

So, speaking of speed, I have still have to do some speed/threshold work even though I'm now training for a marathon. I got a really spiffy training schedule off of the Nike Women's Marathon website. I adjusted the schedule to my best days to do the various workout types. So today I ended up doing 1 mile easy, 4 miles at lactate threshold pace, and 1 mile easy. The first easy mile was in about 10:40 or so, and then the next 4 miles in about 39 minutes (9:45 per mile; a lot of this was a gradual but unrelenting uphill), and then the last easy mile to finish in just over an hour.

My hamstrings have felt a bit tight/sore, so I thought this workout might be too much. But once I got going I felt great, and now that it's over I'm still feeling pretty good. Good enough to take the kids to the zoo :)!