Author Archive Bratwurst

3minutes ain’t that long

at #F3Swift on Tuesday, 7 PAX decided Extra Credit is mandatory, 1 saw fit for the full hour, and 3 late bloomers at least decided they would get a partial 55 minute workout for the day.

The THANG:

• warmup of 1mi with the usual drills between street lights. Head up to the Bull Ring.
• 3min Hard (aka I-pace, 2 mile Race pacepace, Interval pace, or VO2max) and 3min jog recovery.
• Repeato 5x (total of 6) over varied stretches of road that were fairly flat and devoid of road obstructions.
  • See Strava reports here, here, here, and here.
• Cooldown back to COT, but 5 minutes early incurred the Bagpipe penalty of Mermaid’s closing COP.

Moleskin:

• Biggest 0500 group so far.  So big that when we made it back to the parking lot, there was only one or two pax to add for the full hour.  Another reason for the extra 15 minutes – you get to decide if your wardrobe selection was appropriate for the day.  Apparently hoodies are OK for warm-up, OneNiner went “hooded” and HoneyBee found that “unhooded” his “hoodie” kept coming around his shoulder and wanting to talk to him.  Back at the cars, often extra layers are shed or Strange Brew confirms that his choice of sleeveless apparel was spot on.  Kid Rock was decked in fleece from head to toe, but the upper half eventually got peeled off towards the end of the workout.  Testament to the hard work and fairly mild temps of the morning – felt much warmer than 48 degrees on the thermometer and the slight breeze only in one direction.
• Found a little more of the terrain of the business park this AM.  Some PAX remarked how they will have to come back in the day time to figure out where we were at some points.  Even looking at the Strava replays doesn’t help sometimes, dark streets with buildings that look the same can get you turned around.
• Perhaps that explains why it took Cheddar, Gumbo, and Tootie a little while to find us after showing up a little past 0515.  Without explicit directions on the Preblast, their noses found the way.
• Honeybee seems just about ready to throw down at Thunder Road 26.2 in a few weeks.  Those longer intervals seemed to suit him, but Kid Rock kept things close while burning through his multiple layers.  OneNiner found an extra gear to close the gap on the last interval and everyone benefited from the nice downhill.
• Thankful that Brew reads the Preblast and sets the workout on his watch.  When we get strung out, it’s helpful to have another “beep beep beeping” watch in the pack so that everyone gets an honest start and stop.
• Chipotle has been showing up at Swift and Mountain Goat pretty consistently.  Look out for Joe Davis, but he’s already showing big gains.
• Next Tuesday is shaping up to be a mixture of what we’ve had during September (R-pace) and the last two weeks (I-pace).  Should be fun.
• Prayers for Tootie and his M and their 2.1- she was born early and will be coming home from the hospital soon.

Announcements:

• Joe Davis Run – sign up now!
• Timekeeper will kick off a new book “The Meaning of Marriage” by Tim Keller next Tuesday at 0630.

2/1/30 intervals in da Club

#F3Swift launched at 0515 on Tuesday starting a new round of Speed Training.  Some came at 0500 to warm up for a while longer.

The THANG:

• 0500 – 1.3mi at a 9:00/mi pace – warm-up them old bones!
• 0515 – Circle back to the parking lot to pick up the rest of the PAX for a 1.0mi mosey towards the SPX building.  Drills then continue to corner of Ballantyne & Ballantyne (Corporate Pl & Commons Pkwy).
• Start the 2-1-30.  Continual rounds of:
  • 2 minutes Hard (a.k.a. I-pace / Interval Pace / 2 mile Race Pace – find yours here at http://runsmartproject.com/calculator)
  • 1 minute jog recovery and REGROUP
  • 1 minute Hard
  • 30 seconds recovery and REGROUP
  • 30 seconds Hard
  • 30 seconds recovery and REGROUP
• Run over this course (https://www.strava.com/routes/1296732) in the Clockwise direction.
• Run 3 rounds on the East side of the Club.  Cross under 521 in the tunnel taking a long recovery.  Give an option to head back to start point.
• Continue next 3 rounds on the West side of the Club starting in the Club parking lot.  Finish Round 6 heading down Ben Nevis.  Mosey 0.75mi back to the AO.
• COT – total miles between 8.1 (those with extra credit) and 6.3.

Moleskin:

• Coming up with titles for Backblasts saps most of YHCs creative energy for the week (and evidently takes a long time, too!), that’s why Honeybee’s description of his Swift workout was borrowed for this edition.
• Was Champagne lagging this week?  When YHC looked over the Strava Flyby of the workout, Champagne looked like he was about 50 meters behind the PAX at all times, but YHC was pretty sure he was right there in da Club when a Pax called “Car Back” and Champagne responded mid-interval “no, it’s on the Highway”.  Whatever, he was delirious we guess.  Or he was talking about Old Lancaster Hwy.  Or he was delirious.
• 6.3mi was a tad more than the 5.6mi advertised, but that’s due to regrouping.  PAX did excellent work in the REGROUP this week, and the six having a headlamp definitely helped.  Definitely missed a mid-pack StrangeBrew that usually also has the wrist computer programmed with this fancy workout and sounds the end of the intervals for the PAX mid-pack, but that just led to more vocabulary this morning with…
• “Road Hump”, or just “Hump”, “Car Up”, “Ho”, “Hup” as the most common language of the day.  Swift PAX must have their own language when they get out of breath.
• Invasion of South Cackalackie – the word is spreading, and perhaps the Clandestine SoBs invading FortMill from the previous weekend helped, but OneNiner’s tweets brought #TheFort men out in force.  Of course the regulars Ringer and WorldWideLeader were there, and not all of these are from #TheFort, but surely this is the biggest influx of fresh legs (1st or 2nd post) in a long time with Menthol, Bounty Hunter, Rooney, Copay, Wild Turkey, and Tuck.  With the growth of Interval workouts like Swift and Mountain Goat, there’s definitely a need for running-focused days in the workout schedule of the PAX.
• Some more about this I-pace that will come into play again next week.  Hard / Interval pace is about 30-45 seconds slower per mile than your 1-Mile Race pace (see Announcements about your next chance to run 1 Mile race pace).  Find yours here: http://runsmartproject.com/calculator. Hard / Interval pace is also known as VO2Max – the longer you run at your VO2Max, the better.  Not as much benefit if you run the first Interval too fast, then can’t get back up to the Max later in the workout.  Check out this video for more details about I-pace.  STRONGLY suggest that you figure this out before next week.  HINT HINT

Announcements:

• #TimeKeeper / 3rd F following Bagpipe / Swift resumes next week with a new book on Marriage – “The Meaning of Marriage” by Tim and Kathy Keller.
• 1 Mile Time Trial – coming soon to Mountain Goat – check the PreBlasts.
• 1 Mile Time Trial – coming to Swift on 11/3 or 11/10 – depending on Haggis’s schedule.  Since he is co-founder of Swift, we have to run everything through his schedule.

Your Humble Correspondent,

Bratwurst

Sprinkling of Speed

17 PAX swallowed the #DailyRedPill and took to the wet streets of Ballantyne for a weekly dose of Swift.

The THANG:

• 0500 – 5 PAX showed up and went for the early option – Strange Brew, OneNiner, Fire Hazard, Ringer, and Bratwurst got in 1.3 miles while most others were still in transit or contemplating whether to continue their drive to the AO while it was raining.
• 0515 – Grab the cones and head out on the highway, well, at least to the bridge over the Hwy.  Headed on Ballantyne Corporate up Dunreggan Brae and stopped at the beginning of the bridge over 521.  No cars so far.
• Walk delicately over the bridge on your heels, toes, highknees, B-skip, butt kicks, and stride it out.
• The previous three weeks have all been workouts focused on the 1 Mile Race Pace (a.k.a. Repetition Pace / R-pace – find yours at http://runsmartproject.com/calculator).  We will continue that this week, so know your pace.
• Complete 3 rounds of:
  • 200m at R-pace (a.k.a. 1 Mile Race Pace, a.k.a. Repetition Pace – find yours at http://runsmartproject.com/calculator), 200m jog recovery
  • 200m at R-pace, 400m recovery
  • 600m at R-pace, 600m recovery
• Head towards home, stopping on the way for:
  • 200m at R-pace, 200m recovery
  • Head for Home at R-pace, about 500m
• COT at 0614

Moleskin:

• Goal 1 – finish on time this week – check!
• Goal 2 – finish 4 rounds, we’ll get a B+ on that one, for just about 300m short.
• Goal 3 – program the watch to keep track of all of the splits.  B-.  Had some trouble getting to the right program at the start, was fairly successful at laying out the cones at 0, 200, 400, and 600m marks, but hit lap button a few too may times while recovering and messed up the intervals.  At least we had the cones to keep us on track!
• Strange Brew almost turned around in the car as it started pouring on I-485.  Fortunately, he was already 30 minutes into his drive from MECA/NOCO so didn’t want to invest the time in turning around and heading back home.  The rest of us in the lot contemplated staying in our cars, but we’ve had worse.  Let’s do this!
• Turns out most of the guys getting in extra miles on the PreRun are not training for anything that involves long distance.  OneNiner wants to run a Half at some point, Fire Hazard should just pick out something and go with it and just wants the miles for getting faster, pretty sure Strange Brew is doing something at Thunder Road (after all of his miles at high altitude training camp in Bogota, Columbia), and Ringer is just probably lying in wait trying to capture the Fast5 on Saturday.
• We thought this was “our” week with Frasier, so Haggis did his best Frasier impression by just blistering every segment.  Save one 600m, he was the lead all morning.
• Kid Rock, who went sans bandanna today, perhaps it was not rain-proof, didn’t let Haggis go too far once again.  Those 200s are right in his wheelhouse.
• Great to see the Dirty Old Men out there with almost full representation – Strawberry, Heartbreaker, and Big Tuna were there.  Not sure who the 4th is, but these guys are looking to move up the Mud Run stack rankings in 2 weeks.
• Champagne is going to be the Swift PR person – extolling all of the virtues of how Interval running gets you in better shape than just plain vanilla running.
• Wait, 17 at Swift and 15 at Bagpipe?  That’s a reason to CELEBRATE SPEED!  Well done men.  We had so many that they had to run over to where we were to validate the count.  Great seeing other workout groups in the gloom.  It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it confuses the heck out of cars when there are seemingly random PAX running all over the road doing different things.

Announcements:

• Next week at Swift will be a change of Pace.  Going to back off only to “Hard” running with Interval speed and covering new ground.  Mud Run race friendly.
• 3rd F “Timekeeper” that meets at Einsteins following Bagpipe / Swift will be starting up a new topic soon.  Great time to jump in or just check it out.
• Fast5 / Bacon Relay is happening this Saturday at Fort Mill High School at 4pm.  Find 5 guys to run 1kilometer each = 5K total.  The catch is you need either one “Respect” (over 50 years old) or one Clydesdale (over 200 lbs) on your team.  Pretty sure there is extra handicapping if you have both, or that PAX is one and the same.

Peaking on the Pyramid

At 0515 on Tuesday morning, 17 F3 PAX departed from the Vine American Kitchen in Ballantyne for pursuit of a Speed Pyramid.

The THANG:

• 0500 – Fire Hazard, Strange Brew, Mr. Bean, and Outback head out on a pre-run.  After “cone setting”, Bratwurst hunts them down and nips at their heels until back to the Vine.
• 0515 – Depart from the Vine and head over to The Landing Strip (a.k.a. North Community House Dr).  Use the route through the Ballantyne Resort hotel and up Ballantyne Commons.
• Once at the Met Life building, do some dynamic warm-up with heels, toes, high knees, and butt kicks.  Stride it out and then mosey down to the start of the prelaid cones along North Community House that mark 200m intervals down along the section that crosses over I-485 to Endhaven Ln.
• Speed Pyramid – All intervals run at R-pace (http://runsmartproject.com/calculator) with an equal distance recovery jog.
  • 1st level – 4x200m @ R-pace (200m recovery)
  • 2nd level – 2x400m @ R-pace (400m recovery)
  • The top for the 3rd level – 800m @ R-pace (800m recovery)
  • 2nd level – 2x400m
  • 1st level – 4x200m – done on the way back home.
• After the last 200m, get home (LATE at 0620) and having finished just under 7miles total.

Moleskin:

• Cobains to the PAX for YHC running this workout too long.  It’s a lot to get in and we were quite a ways off from the home base.  When YHC checked the watch at 0555 and we were still in the 400s, should have cut those off and done them on the way home.  Fortunately Tiger Rag had a phone for us to not get separated too much from the safety of home.
• Crossing Johnston Rd was an adventure again.  Unfortunately it’s just necessary sometimes when we don’t have enough time to get all the way out to Community House for the workout.  Next time, we’ll stage someone at the crosswalk with their finger on the button.  However, Chipotle was VERY motivated to move quickly in front of the cars at the red light as the crosswalk sign counted down while on the way home.  Got to figure that in to a workout somehow.  It’s not finish first, it’s finish before the giant countdown clock counts down – just like in the American Ninja Warrior finals.
• Welcome to Swift FNGs Menthol and Rooney from the Fort!  Welcome to Swift FNG Kid Rock who has already become another target for Haggis!
• There were some #smokeboots out at this one.  The aforementioned Haggis and Kid Rock were blazing.  Haggis must have some of those Ultra miles behind him, for he was absolutely rocking all of the intervals when normally he slows as the length increases. Who gave him EPO?
• Gerber and Mr. Bean (who was encouraged by Haggis to give everything, then was heard encouraging others like “BRR-ready Cheddar” that “it’s just an 800”) were stalking the leaders.
• The mini cones in the dark for the leaders were illuminated by Tiger Rag’s head spotlight, for he was just behind. We’re sure a few of the “Car Back” callouts were actually just Pax confusing a P’diddle for Tiger Rag.
• The rest of the Pax were there fighting to find their R-pace. While you may be familiar with it, the 800 will make you keep it honest.
• Chipotle, with Strange Brew horse whispering, had no problem knocking down all 7 miles of this workout.
• YHC knows that this THANG happened over 24 hours ago, but what else went on out there?

Announcements:

• More R-pace next week.  Familiar location, but a Fresh mixture of intervals.
• Haven’t set your R-pace in a while?  Go run the Fast5 (a.k.a. Bacon Relay) down at the Fort on October 17th at 4pm.  An all-out 1K can be plugged into the Pace Calculator at http://runsmartproject.com/calculator
• Want a Fresh 1-Mile Race time? It’s looking like November, two weeks after the Mud Run will be the next chance.       More details to come.