A great workout morning can turn me philosophical.
Matador Miles is a classic Monta Vista cross-country workout. The team runs out to Stevens Creek County Park for a run we call Matadors’ Point (the park labels these trails “Tony Look” and “Loop Trail”, but we call these Matadors’ and The Keyhole; it’s important for a tribe to have its own language). In the first years I was coaching at Monta Vista, I tried out a lot of places where the team could run interval workouts, and one afternoon I was out on Matadors’ walking back and forth with a wheel to measure out intervals. That’s why there are still numbers scrawled on various trees with black sharpies. And Matador Miles was born.
Matador Miles is a solid workout; we head out to run Matadors’ and run mile repeats with a one-minute break. The break is not a ‘recovery’, this is more of a mental reset to keep on track instead of running continuously at the same pace. If you run three intervals, that’s an eight-mile day with three miles of real quality. That’s hard.
Matador Miles is intended to be a lactate threshold workout, my favorite zone to focus on. The goal is to run each mile at your lactate threshold pace; in theory, this is about 30 seconds slower than your 5 km race pace, and this should be a pace you could maintain for 45 minutes to an hour before fatigue forces you to slow down. But I think it’s more important to learn what this pace should feel like. Lactate threshold intervals are described as ‘comfortably fast’, or ‘hard, but repeatable’. The pace should feel fast and challenging but also smooth and under control, and while you cannot have a normal conversation you should be able to get out a few words; “good job”, “stick with me”, “the finish is close”. This is not meant to be a workout where you go to the well for the last bits of your reserve. At the end of the workout, if I asked you to run one more rep at the same pace, the goal is to feel like the answer is “yes I could, but I would prefer not to!”.
Besides the training, I think we often learn a lot in these runs. For example, Katherine latched on to Coach Janne for a couple of reps, and told me later how much easier it felt to lock on to someone and find a pace; such an important insight for all runners: our teammates and running partners help so much.
But even more, I just think getting up in the early morning and doing something physically challenging with a bunch of people I like is simply fun. Fun. Sometimes I shy away from using the word “fun” because new runners and non-runners don’t understand how running hard mile repeats can be fun, so I use words like ‘satisfying’. Yet for me, getting up in the morning and doing something hard with people I like while almost everyone else is still in bed is really, really fun. And going to get coffee or breakfast with the people I just did that with is fun. I feel great and fulfilled for the rest of the day. I’ve put a great workout in the bank, and I did it with friends. I have so many memories from Matador Miles, and even in years where I don’t remember the details, I know it was a great morning. I can’t think of a much better way to start a day or a weekend.
Thank you to all 34 of you — more than half our team! — who got up and shared the morning and the workout with me and with each other. It’s not just about being a better runner, it’s about being part of a team and a tribe, and a shared commitment to find out how good we can be. Mornings like this are why I do this job.
“[Being a runner is] about getting out the door and running when the rest of the world is only dreaming about having the passion that you live each and every day with.”
– Paul Maurer
