Intervals are hard

I was going to take a nice bike ride today - only to find out my poor new tire had a blowout inside the shed. Hopefully just a pinch flat, but I didn't have time to change it and still get in much of a ride.

Decided to do some work on foot instead. Warmed up one mile. Ran half mile hard, walk one tenth, repeat for four work intervals. Finish it off with a couple shorter jogging intervals to warm down.

I hope that helps since I have nothing in the way of long runs to count toward my Steelhead half Ironman preparation. Going to have to just wing it on "muscle memory" and a few short runs.

Race Report: John Wall Mile

Today I ran the John Wall Mile in Severna Park, Maryland. This race commemorates John Wall, an Olympian who apparently represented the United States at the 1936 Berlin Summer Games (the games at which Jesse Owens dominated the athletics events).

This was my first actual track competition of any distance, and I was dreading the pain of running hard for a mile!

They ran the race in heats of about 20-30 runners, starting from slowest (estimated finish over 10 minutes) to fastest. I seeded myself in the 8-to-9 minute heat.

I think I did not warm up enough close to the start of the race - I walked and jogged about 1.5 miles, but cooled down while watching the heat in front of me. Once I started running it took me over half a mile for my heart rate to get up to speed. It shows my maximum is still around 185 bpm, though. I maintained a good effort level while running - I don't think I could have forced myself to run any harder today.

Finish time: 8:44. PR! I've never run an official one mile race before, so any time would have been a PR. However, it was still 11 seconds faster than my fastest-ever Garmin-timed mile at the start of a 5K.

This gives me a good benchmark to work from. Let's see if I can beat it next year! Alas, I would have to be 1:14 faster in the mile in order to meet the qualifying standard for the 2009 Summer National Senior Games (about 7:30 for the mile for age 50-54 women, that is, 7:00 for 1500m).

8 x 200

Another speedwork session in the books! And here's the evidence:

Warm up, and then eight times halfway around the track at my top-end speed, followed by eight recovery jogs around the other half of the track. Turn around to unwind my legs every mile.

Yeah, the pace recording is still not good. I have to tweak those settings again. But the heart rate shows I did my job today!

Times today for those eight 1/8-mile "speedy" segments are:

1. 1:09
2. 1:10
3. 1:10
4. 1:09
5. 1:08
6. 1:06
7. 1:09
8. 1:08

Average 1:09 or 9:09 min/mile pace. Yep, faster than my current 5K pace (though I haven't raced one in ages).

I'd love to link those together and be running low 9-minute miles regularly, but that won't happen for a while. . . . we'll see!

And to my Canadian friends: You're welcome to come get your geese now. We've had quite enough of them for this winter. You're also welcome to clean up their poop which is accumulating on my track. Thank you.

More speedwork

Well, that didn't exactly work as planned! I went over to the track with my Garmin and did 8x100 (warmup and then one fast 100 within each quarter-mile lap of the track), and motivated myself by thinking of the lovely plot I would have with 8 beautiful little dips that went deep into Single Digit Pace Land. Unfortunately it seems that the Garmin doesn't record pace very frequently and my speediness was so quick it missed several of the sprints.

Oh well, I'll wear the heart rate meter next time which has a higher sampling rate and shows more detail.

My LEGS know that I've done some speed work (and that's what counts), even if my pace plot doesn't show it.