Friday, December 16, 2011

Intervals and Reps: Then and Now

I'm attempting to ramp up the pace I train at as I get ready for the Mississippi Blues Half Marathon in January. Today the plan was to run some 800-meter intervals and 400-meter reps. A couple months ago I did a similar workout, so I thought it might be handy to compare the two workouts.

Last time the plan was to run 6 X 1000 meters at a 6:30 pace, followed by 4 X 400 meters at a 6:00 pace.

This time, with my faster pacing, the plan was to run 5 X 800 meters at a 6:00 pace, then 6 X 400 meters at a 5:30 pace. As before, I'd get 2 minutes rest between the longer intervals, and 3 minutes between the shorter reps. But this time I wasn't running on a track, and I wasn't on my home turf, which I think made it a little more difficult. How did I do?

Intervals:
Then: 6:14, 6:28, 6:25, 6:22, 6:21, 6:18
Now: 6:00, 6:01, 6:08, 6:13, 6:09

Reps:
Then: 5:51, 6:04, 5:43, 5:32
Now: 5:34, 5:44, 5:44, 6:01, 6:17, 7:17

I did all right on the intervals, but the reps were another story. I really started falling apart after rep #3. The last rep was on a fairly steep uphill, so that's understandable, but otherwise I didn't do great at all. Why? Perhaps I'm just in worse form than I was two months ago. Or perhaps the fact that I wasn't on the track and didn't have my iPod contributed. Also, running the intervals faster took a lot out of me -- maybe I'm just not quite ready for this much of an increase in speed. I have another similar workout planned for next week, so maybe I'll do better then.

Details of today's workout are below:


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