View of Belmont Plateau during States, with Philadelphia in the background
Wednesday, November 4th: Workout at Belmont Plateau today. After driving over to the iconic course immediately after school, we parked in the lower lots and started our warm-up through the back trails, around Parachute Hill. My goal for the day was to complete 8x800 meters on the Front Hill 1-mile loop, the first mile of the actual race course. For those unfamiliar with Belmont, the first mile is a giant circuit, which goes up for roughly 600 meters, before a blistering second half that ends on a trail into the woods near where the race starts. We did our pieces right on this loop, taking a break at the midway point, with anywhere between 2-2.5 minutes of recovery. The first splits of every set of two 800's were consistently slower than the second splits, given the nature of the course, but we understood this was a product of the difficulty of the terrain, and continued to push through the effort. My splits were, in order, 2:20.4, 2:16.06, 2:21.7, 2:18.5, 2:23.1, 2:19.0, 2:24.6, 2:20.3. I had to fight for every step by the end of the workout, since they were being run at paces faster than my own race pace on this course, but I think that everybody came away from this day happy with their effort. I wasn't able to take as good care of my body as I would've liked in the preceding few days, but for where I was at the time of the workout physically, I thought it was a pretty decent effort. We ran our cooldown around the lower fields, and stretched out before heading back into the city. We'll have another shot at a workout very similar to this in about a week, so I'm looking forward to improving upon my effort once I get another shot at it.
Thursday, November 5th: After the intensity of yesterday's workout, we dialed it way back today. I decided to start the run with the rest of the team in a big group, and eventually after about a mile I broke off with Phil Celona, our assistant coach, and completed the rest of the run at a comfortable pace. We ran through the campus of Philadelphia University before turning up to Allegheny and running back down towards our track. In total, today was 31:45 minutes, averaging around 7:45/mile pace, which was a great break in the middle of a busy week. I just let my muscles take a day to recover, so that they could come back at full strength for the rest of the week's work.
