Notes
I ran my hardest workout in a long time this evening, and it went really well. I did Pete's old quarters workout of 2x[8x400m], where the first set has constant pace and decreasing rest of 60, 60, 50, 50, 40, 30, 20 seconds, and the second set has constant recovery (I bumped it up to 50 seconds) with accelerating reps.
I held remarkably consistent 74-75 sec reps for the first set while still feeling very smooth. The 50-60 second recoveries felt long, and I was mostly recovered before starting the next rep. On the second set, the 50 sec recovery continued to feel fairly comfortable, while I surprised myself with how much and how smoothly I brought down the times - hitting 75, 73, 73, 71, 71, 70, 69, 66. That last rep was essentially all out, but I was really pleased with how fast it was at the end of this hard workout.
This is about as fast as I've ever run this workout, which was surprising and exciting. Definitely want to keep focusing on some of this longer speed work over the next few months as a contributor to bringing down my times in the longer races.