The Salazar tempo run as warm down

Last week I tried something a bit different after racing a local 5k road event. The race went well with a second place in 15.10 after I had taken the pace out early and tried to drop the field.

Anyway the plan was to try out the 'Salazar warm-down after the race. The basic idea is that to get the most out of a hard day you need to make it hard. So after racing, Alberto Salazar often has his athletes jump into some kind of tempo effort to get some extra volume of quality aerobic work in. In recent times the likes of Mo Farah and Galen Rupp have been seen doing 15mins or so at sub 5 min miling after track races. A while back I often used to run a 3k in 10mins flat (2.20 marathon pace) after a track workout to get the feel for marathon pacing so the idea is not entirely new to me, but still, going for a longer effort straight after a race is.

Back to wednesday and after crossing the line a couple of seconds behind winner Shaun Antell and getting my breath back I jogged a few minutes back to the car, had some water and then changed shoes and top before running the opposite way round the course in 16.40 and this was a kind of crescendo effort with the first km being more like 3.35 and the last nearer 3.15 with the middle portion being about 3.20. It seemed to work out quite well and though I had to focus a bit the last km it was a surprisingly comfortable effort. With a couple of kms of quality running in the warm up that made for a 12km workout around a 5k race which I guess is the whole point of doing the workout like this rather than trying to come back the next day and run a 20min tempo on tired and sore legs.

Next morning my legs felt surprisingly good - which is about as scientific as saying fried chicken is super food because I once had a good race after eating it - but still, they felt pretty good. Its an experiment I plan to repeat after my other short races this summer.