Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Jealousy run
5/07/2005
Workout Type: Strength - Tempo Intervals
Course: Loretto
Distance: 11.88
Time: 52:00
Speed: 4:23 min/km
Average HR: 160
With all the beautiful people up at the Gold Coast this weekend (apologies to any beautiful people reading this who weren't up there), I spent most of yesterday afternoon absorbing race reports and cursing the fact I wasn't there. This separation anxiety joined me in my run today, and my legs demanded that I let them go fast. My brain cut them a deal that we would do one lap fast, and one lap slow, and that the fast stuff would be threshold pace - no faster. With its fingers crossed, my legs agreed. Because the lap distances vary (about 730-760m), I'll use mins/km to step through the workout.
An inbetween first lap (4:22/km) whilst the aforementioned negotations were taking place, and then an easy but brisk 4:01 pace lap. After dropping back to 4:46 for my easy lap, things got a bit out of hand, with successive quick laps as follows (the slow laps were all about 5min/km):
3:42 min/km
3:43 min/km
3:39 min/km
3:34 min/km
3:36 min/km
3:28 min/km
The good thing was that these were all really controlled, and felt nothing like a race effort. My breathing was deep and easy, and my HR never got much above 170. To be running 36:00 10km pace so easily was a great boost to my morale.
A couple of caveats though. Firstly, there was only a little over 5km of fast running - so extrapolating 10km times is silly. Secondly, the recoveries were around 3:40-3:50. Normally in a session like this, I would be running 1-2km reps with 30-60 second recoveries (although more at 3:40-3:45 pace than the quicker stuff at the end)., and would do 8-10km of fast running. Thirdly, when I finshed my second quick interval in 3:42, I remembered that in September last year I ran an entire half marathon at this pace. The conclusion from this is that I have a long way to go, and sessions like this are an indulgence while I am building my mileage. However, with nearly 12 km of running, and over 5km at a solid pace, I felt really good at the end of the session, and walked away very encouraged.
Went to the zoo with Louis, Amelia, my sister and my niece yesterday afternoon, which was fantastic. Louis is just at an age where he is starting to get a thrill out of things like this - although pigeons turned out to be his favourite animal, as he chased them around the food court. A historical shot today, as we forgot to take the camera.
