The Tempo

This week, I want to talk a little bit about one of the workouts that I have been doing a lot during my time here in Portland: The Tempo. It is a workout we usually do in preparation for cross country, but we did one last Tuesday too, in preparation for the 10km.

A tempo is something I had never done before I came to Portland, but it is a workout that is used regularly in the USA. We have 3 different locations for them: the forest, the track, and Columbia Park, a park close to school with a paved loop of almost a kilometer long. Tempo's are longer, faster runs at a pace slower than race-pace, but hard enough that you are pretty tired by the end. Many people dread them, because you have to run such a fast pace for so long, as opposed to doing intervals where you get time to recover in between - and that is exactly why they are good!

During cross country, we do tempo's in the forest. We tend to do a lot of slow mileage over the summer to create a base, and tempo's are perfect to make the transition to faster work. In my freshmen year, I used to do 3 mile (4.8 km) tempo's and the last couple years I did 4 mile tempo's.

During track, we sometimes do tempo's on the track, but I have been lucky enough to escape those during indoors because I was racing on the days that the team was doing them (It's mind-numbing to run 16 laps on a 400m-oval!).

This meant that I had my first tempo in months, this time in Columbia Park. The exciting (and scary!) part about this workout was that we also had our first ever 5 mile tempo. The men's team probably laughs at this because they regularly do 9 mile tempo's (!!!) to prepare for their 10k cross country races, but hey, you have to start somewhere!

Except for some frozen body-parts because of the rain (It has been raining here basically non-stop for all of Spring Break :( ), we had a very good workout, running 5:40-5:45 pace for most of it and a quicker mile at the end. The middle part was a little hard, which is one of the reasons why it was good to do this workout, because the middle part in the 10km will be hard too! This is the point where you are getting tired from all the running so far, but you still have a long time to go. We were able to finish strong and after some jogging to recover, we did some 40 seconds pick-ups to end the workout. It was nice to do some speed after, and to focus on running fast and with good form when tired.

This coming week, school starts again, which is too bad, but on Friday I will go to the World Indoors Track (A 15 min drive away from school, lucky me!!) to see some of the best athletes in the world compete!