Vendting your Feelings

Timedfinals.com has an excellent interview with Erik Vendt which delves into the psyche of the resurgent athlete. One of the questions asks about memorable sets:

Your 30 x 1,000’s (10 on 10:45, 10:30, 10:15 right) is the thing of legend. Are there any other sets in your career (Ocean State Squids/USC/Michigan) that stick out in your mind?

My freshman year at USC-and this isn’t crazy like 30 x 1,000’s…but what is? We did 3 x 100 IM’s and a 1000, three times. I got down to 8:58 on the last 1000 and I remember thinking “I can’t believe I just did that.” It was the first time I had ever done anything close to that fast in workout. Another bad one from when I was at Squids was 20 x 400’s…descend 1-20 (editor’s note: that’s impossible). Stuff like that is so hard because you’re pretty much going all out by the 15th one.

But I don’t think I’ll ever get anywhere close to that again. Sometimes we’ll have a 6,000m main set but that’s only once in a very long while. It’s usually 3,000 to 4,000 main sets with a lot higher intensity than what I did before. I think that’s the reason for having so much improvement in my 200 and 400. I already have the aerobic base and I don’t see myself losing too much in the back end so at this point it’s more about establishing that front-end easy speed.

Go have a read.