I really was not sure how the left foot was going to react to running faster, but I really, really wanted to try out the New Balance 1400 v6 on the track. So I headed over to Colby and endured all the vehicular traffic and foot traffic from the students moving in. Luckily the track itself was just about empty.

While I was getting ready to run, I decided to put my Garmin on the same arm as my Timex and that way go hi-tech and old school pretty much at the same time.

Thankfully, the humidity was a lot lower than it has been, but the sun and temps were raising to higher levels than I expected. However, it wasn’t that bad and I wanted to complete a full workout.

My plan was to do a mile warm-up, mile time trial and then 8 quarters, with a mile cool-down. I haven’t completed an outdoor track workout as planned since I moved outside, so that was more important than how fast/hard I did the quarters.

As you can see, if you can read my writing, I went old school while doing my workout. It meant writing down the times from the Timex after the lap and stopping to quickly do it. Which meant a little longer between intervals and I think that the short delays helped me recover better than I have in the past.

My times were very consistent, which surprised me, but it seems that I get to a comfortably hard pace and that is about all I want to do. Running by myself, I don’t get beyond the curtain and push myself to go the speeds that I should be hitting – at least in my opinion.

I did use the Garmin on this portion of the workout and it is running time. It also turns out that I ran a slightly different segment route than the person who created the .26 lap segments for Colby’s track. Their end point is somewhere up on the corner and I stopped at the finish line and went over to the lane divider on the corner, where I had my notebook to write down the time and then walked to the green marker on the corner in lane 2. Somewhere up on that corner is where I should have finished for that segment.

Another reason to focus on the Timex and not worry about Strava segments to review how you did, although the graph is a pretty good depiction of what I did.

No, I didn’t do the cool-down, I was getting tired and the left foot was starting to complain just a little. At this point I didn’t want to press my luck, so I figured it was time to shut it down.

I like the graph and will keep using the Garmin for speed session, but next time I will just use it for running time/graphs for the entire workout versus attempting to document the mile time trial and end up having three separate workout entries. The notebook will have the official interval times.

Next time I do track work, I think that I am going to do it without music, I just want to see if I run differently with or without using my race playlist. Another thing is that I might do shorter repeats to work on busting through the comfortably hard effort ceiling that I seem to have created for myself.

The reality is that

I came just a little bit closer to breaking 7:00 minutes for the mile. I have a feeling that it is more a problem with the upstairs than anything wrong with the old body. Today I only needed 4 more seconds and I know pretty much where I lost the sub 7:00 when I think about it and look at the graph. The Back stretch on laps 2 and 3, I just didn’t focus on going faster – enough. Next month I will get it.

Otherwise I did a pretty good job on finishing the 8 quarters and the consistency was really good. Actually, I liked using the Timex for tracking my repeats and was more relaxed on the rest intervals because they were not being timed. It gave me the time I really needed to get ready for the next interval. At this point in my running it is more important to run quality intervals than it is to push the rest time.

Also when I got looking back through my notebook, it had old track workouts from 2012 and I chuckled when I saw them. The times are just a bit different and makes me chuckle about how much I have slowed down

It seems as though I am heading backwards sometimes and going back to what works for me.

So how did the the NB 1400 v6 do?

No issues, great grip, quiet, stable and comfortable. They did everything I asked of them and helped me run well on the track today. No, they do not have the same snap as the Zoom Fly SP have for me, but at the same time they are still a faster shoe than I will ever run in them.

Another good workout and confidence builder. Just not as fast as an old fart would love to be at this point. 😉 I will get there or I won’t, but I will keep working hard to get there.