Flashes of Panic

After Sunday’s long run, one of the ultra-runners in our group was asking about speedwork. So far, all she’s done is mile repeats on a treadmill, four at a time, and she’s both bored with it and not sure what else to try. (This is not uncommon for people who didn’t run in high school or college and therefore didn’t build up extensive experience with track work.)

Someone else was suggesting 100m pick-ups on an ordinary roar run, but she didn’t have any idea how to estimate 100m. So I told her about the pick-ups Coach Squires used to assign us: one every five minutes, 1-2-1, 1-2-1, 1-1-1 (and yes, that’s a 45-minute workout; you don’t slack off in between those pick-ups).

Then I described a workout I used to do years ago. I had read in Frank Murphy’s The Silence of Great Distance (which, by the way, is a tremendous book and well worth reading, particularly as Stephanie Herbst-Lucke has been breaking masters’ records in the last year) about the “dynamic runs” that Peter Tegen developed at the University of Wisconsin. I can’t find details in the book now, and I knew I couldn’t hold the complex workouts in my head, so I simplified.

At the time, I had a watch with a multiple-segment countdown timer. This meant you could program one segment to one time, a second to a different time, and so on up to seven segments. The watch would count down each segment, beeping at the end of each one, then starting the next one. I would program quasi-random strings of numbers—phone numbers were a favorite—and start the countdown after about 20 minutes of warm-up. When the watch beeped, I would change pace, picking up or slowing down. Because there were an odd number of segments, when the watch looped around, I’d be running hard on segments which had been recovery on the previous series. And

So from a complicated root, I pulled a simple workout: run phone numbers.

I wonder if I could pull a magazine article out of that. Or get the workout named for me. Probably only if I could explain it more simply.

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