The 40-50 Workout

The University of Oregon does a well know workout called the "30-40" workout. "The 30-40 consists of this: Run the first half of a 400-meter lap in 40 seconds, the second half in 30 seconds. And repeat, as often as you can stand to do it. It requires repeatedly pushing into anaerobic territory, recovering slightly and doing it again." (from http://www.oregonlive.com/sports/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/sports/1224550533173210.xml&coll=7). There is also a message board thread about the workout and paces and conversions at http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=2724380&page=0

I converted the workout to paces that I thought would be appropriate for my current condition, 40 seconds for the quick 200 meters (5:20 pace for 1600 meters) and 50 seconds for the slow 200 meters (6:40 pace for 1600 meters). The quick pace of 5:20 is halfway between my current mile pace (5:06.5 on 6/8/08, the only all out mile I have ran recently) and 5k pace (5:34 pace, 17:17 chip time on 6/28/09). The recovery pace of 6:40 is approximately my current marathon pace (6:38 pace, 2:53:48 on 5/17/09, downhill so it does not really count) or (6:48 pace, 2:58:22 on 11/2/08, NYC). Also one other change I decided to do 6400 meters total (16 * 200 meters fast, slow) instead of stopping the workout after I did not hit a split.

Anyway I averaged 40.6 for the fast 200 meters and 50.4 for the recovery 200 meters. The range was 37.3 to 42.8 for the fast 200 meters and 44.3 to 53.5 for the recovery 200 meters. I completed the 6400 meters in 24:17 (6:00, 6:07, 6:14, 5:56) 1600 meter splits. All in all the workout was not as bad as I thought it would be. The recovery 200 meters felt relatively easy for the first mile or two, however, during the third and forth miles the workout started to catch up to me and even the recovery 200 meters were not much of a recovery. If I do the workout again anytime soon I would like to try to be stricter about keeping the splits under 40 and 50 seconds. My complete splits were 39.4, 48.2, 40.3, 50.0, 40.2, 49.8, 40.8, 51.2, 40.7, 49.6, 41.3, 50.7, 41.2, 51.4, 40.7, 51.5, 41.0, 52.3, 40.9, 51.9, 41.0, 50.8, 42.8, 53.5, 40.4, 51.6, 41.7, 49.0, 40.5, 51.1, 37.3, 44.3

The main reason I did this workout is because I am running a 10k on 9/19/09 (10 days from now) so I figured this would be a good workout to get my legs moving at a slightly quicker pace then most of my workouts have been. Since I am aiming to run mostly longer races this fall for my 'hard' workouts I have been concentrating on marathon pace runs of 10 to 12 miles, tempos runs of 5 miles at half-marathon pace and hill repeats.