Kosmic Kosmin sets me up for STEEP phase

We were promised this would be "fun".

Well, it was. Which just goes to show that I am as cracked as the rest of you, given that the four one-minute repeats with ever-decreasing rest periods left me literally on my knees gasping for oxygen like a stranded fish. (Not that fish have knees, of course. Or do repeats on a running track, for that matter.)

This time I did not make the mistake of trying to keep up with Kyle. I can't say it made things noticeably easier. I set my watch to bleep at me every 20 seconds. So I'd "sprint" off, hear a bleep, thank Something Great that I was a third of the way through, try to recover a little.. just in time for the next bleep signalling the final 20 seconds, in response to which I had determined to produce a blistering finishing burst. Yes, well.

The generous 3 minutes rest after the first repeat suckered us in. It was cut to 2, then to 1, so that I soon felt the tingling hands and arms that tell you that whatever you're trying to do, you aren't getting enough oxygen to do it. When I got my face of the grass on the infield after the last 60-second repeat, I saw Marci still marking Kyle's finishing point...for one awful, horrible, body-numbing moment I thought we we going to do another one. My brain screamed "I CAN'T do another one". It didn't have to. False alarm.

Before we started the test we asked the question that people had been asking us. "If you want to know how fast you can run a mile, why not just run a mile?" As we suspected, the point is that doing it this way you mimic what it is like to RACE the distance, not just run it. "If I just had you run a mile" said Bobby, "there's no way you would be able to push yourselves hard enough -- there are very few athletes who can do that in training."

The predicted times are also used by Those who Know to provide track rep speeds and target time trial times for the next phase of training.

The Kosmin test is statistics-based and has been proved to be reliable by the simple fact that thousands of athletes have used it and proved it. And I can tell you that we now know just how hard the last 400m of a "real" mile is going to be.

So, adding up the distance I accumulated with each 60-second burst, gave me 1298 metres (I was averaging the equivalent of 77 seconds per 400m). When the numbers are crunched, this gives me a predicted 1500m time of 4:50.1 and a predicted mile of 5:12.3. Given that I was convinced I would be hard pushed to get near a 6-minute mile, this was astoundingly good news, as that is roughly the pace I produced to place in last year's Pearl Street Mile -- and we're still 5 months away from the event!

If I can suck up the same level of pain (I mean "fun") for 5k, then I should get in around 18:02, which tells me I am really recovering from the injury-mystery virus-low iron Wingerama that was my "base" period.

All I have to do now is close a half-lap on Kyle!

Oh yes, and stay healthy and free from injury as we head into the next phase of training that involves strength work, hills and some shorter, faster runs.

* If you want to try a Kosmin for yourself -- "How to" details and a Kosmin Kalculator are available on Brian Mackenzie's site here.