My favorite running store, Footzone, sponsors and facilitates a lot of great activities. A couple months ago they teamed up with a local speedy runner to offer performance running clinics every Tuesday evening. The speedy runner is Max King, and he turns out to be as nice as he is fast. And he’s very, very fast!
I do a lot of running alone, and I didn’t expect to enjoy doing speed work with a group. But I’ve been really enjoying the clinics! Max welcomes all abilities and there are always two workout options – one for runners training for shorter races, and another for those of us with an eye on longer races. We’ve been meeting after dark at a park with wide, lighted sidewalks that happen to have four loops with distances from 400 meters to 1000 meters. Rather ideal for what we’ve been doing.
Max calls out times for the different groups (it gets quite festive at times with several groups out running different distances at different speeds), so we can tell if we’re hitting our targets. I wear my Garmin to each clinic, but I can’t read it except when I’m standing still right under a light. So I just hit the lap button at appropriate times and let it keep track of my times and distances for downloading later. Those downloads tell me that I am, indeed, getting faster than I was last summer. How cool is that? I’m having fun and getting faster!
Thanks, Max!
