Thursday's Intervals

Tonight I ran intervals at the gym on the treadmill. It was supposed to be an easy run night, since on Saturday I am running my first 5K of the season. It will be the Starflight 5K. I only ran for thirty minutes and did about four intervals. The first was more a warm up interval, for the second I sped up to 6.6 MPH and maintained that for ten minutes. Then the last two I sped up to 7.5 MPH and 8 MPH and tried to maintain those speeds as long as possible. In both cases it was about thirty seconds. I seemed better at these speeds than a couple of weeks ago when I couldn't even breath, I was bouncing around so much and needed more air than I could get.

Hopefully the race will turn out good and I get a personal best. Anyway it should set a benchmark for the entire spring season. My goal is to get under 30 minutes for the season, and I would really like to get under 29 minute. We will see what happens.

Thursday's Intervals

Tonight was interval night at the gym. I ran for forty minutes and did eight intervals. I started at six MPH and worked up to seven MPH, I did two intervals at seven MPH than started working back down to six MPH.

Last night, after I got home, I was exhausted. I think it is all the running I have been doing. I have had three nights of intense exercise. Hopefully, tonight's spinning will do different muscles, so it will give the running muscles some time off. If not I can sleep late tomorrow, and take it easy.

I was trying to watch the Democratic debate on TV at the gym last night but the first treadmill was not very close to the TV so about interval 3 I move down one section, where it was a lot easier to watch CNN. But, on the new treadmill, I could hear Hillary and the commentator, but I could not hear Barack. So after doing about five more intervals I finished and went home to watch the debate. Luckily, we had the debate recorded.

Thursday's Intervals

Tonight I ran intervals on the treadmill at the gym. It went pretty well, my fastest interval was close to 8 MPH, I'm not sure how long I held that speed, I had worked up to that speed by increasing the speed every 30 seconds by about a half mile per hour. I probably held the speed for about one minute, I could hardly breath at that rate.

Toward the end I held one interval at 6.1 miles per hour for about ten minutes. Given a couple more weeks and I should start see some real results. :-) And all this with out a nose bleed.

I was hoping to go to spinning class last night but I was worried about my nose so I took the day off.

I did have one problem tonight, for some reason, I could not get the enter button on my Garmin to work. After fiddling with it for a little I pressed start and it started recording. Then about 10 minutes into the run I noticed that the unit was saying that no satellites were available and it ask if I was running indoors. So I pressed enter and it worked. It seemed to work fine after that. I hope this is not a sign of things to come. I sure like my Garmin.

Thursday Night's Run at the Gym

I went to the gym again tonight and worked out on the treadmill. I ran an abbreviated set of intervals which consisted of two intervals, where each interval was at 6.5 MPH and lasted for 4 minutes. This is quite a bit less than I was doing a couple of weeks ago. My goal over the next several weeks is to get so I am doing 8 sets of 4 minutes each. And I want the last interval to be as strong as the first.

This morning I did one set of 20 crunches, one set of 25 setups and a side plank on each side.

Rained out!

One quarter of the way through my Interval run it started raining. I had adjusted the distances on my two intense legs and I was just getting them dialed in. The new interval session is as follows:

1. Run until lap is pressed.
2. Repeat the following 4 times.
1. Run .33 miles keeping pace below 8:45 minutes per mile.
2. Walk until heart rate goes below 105.
3. Jog until lap is pressed
4. Run .25 miles keeping pace below 8:45 minutes per mile.
5. Walk until heart rate goes below 105.
6. Jog until lap is pressed.
3. Jog one mile.

The first leg I went too far and on the second leg I cut it short by about 500 feet. It's hard to see my watch at night.

Here is what Motionbased had to say about tonight's session.

Here are the lap rates:


Perhaps tomorrow will be better, but then it is supposed to get cold and nasty tonight. Today was our last day this week of nice weather; we actually had blue sky for about an hour today.

Sunday it is supposed to be right at freezing for the Jingle Bells 5K. I need to decide if I want to run it. It is put on by MADD, so John must be involved, which means it would be a good race.

Tuesday Night's Intervals on Wednesday

I really needed to get out and run tonight, for the last several weeks I have been sloughing off. First was the two weeks in Europe then giving blood on Monday and they said not to exercise for 24 hours. Then to top it all off, my usual Wednesday group had other things to do; ie. going to a UT basketball for one. Finally about 8:30 I got ready and ran. I was stiff for the first quarter mile or so but soon that went away and I think I did real good.

I did 8 intervals with each interval being a quarter of a mile. The recovery was the time it took for my heart rate to fall below 105 while walking. In the previous runs I had the rate set to 115.



The motionbased view is here.

Tuesday's Interval Run

Tuesday run went a whole lot better than expected. I expected the times to be 9 minutes or more and I thought I might have trouble getting all the laps below 10 minutes.

Here is the results:

Lap	Time	Pace	RT
1	2:09	8:36	0:54
2	2:13	8:52	1:17
3	1:59	7:56	0:35
4	2:15	9:00	1:34
5	2:11	8:44	1:20
6	2:36	10:24	0:51

* RT - Recovery Time (The recovery time is all over the place. I will try to get better results next time)

In conclusion, I think next week I will set the high time to 9 minutes and the low time to 7:30 and do 8 repeats.

Plans for Tuesday's Interval Run

Here is the plan for tomorrows interval run.

1. Wait until lap key
2. Repeat 6 times
1. Go .25 miles at a pace of 8:00 / mile to 9:30 / mile.
2. Let heart rate go under 105 bps.
3. Wait until lap key.
3. Go 1 mile

The first interval will start at the top of the hill and the second will start at the bottom of the hill. After doing this a couple of times I will increase the distance to 0.33 mile and increase the loop count to 8.

I hope to finish each interval a little bit faster than the previous run. Here is a table of the previous paces.

1. 9:28 (down hill)
   
2. 9:48 (up hill)
   
3. 8:08 (down hill)
4. 9:00 (up hill)
5. 8:40 (down hill)
6. 10:20 (up hill)

Perhaps I should set the max pace a little faster. Also, make the first two independent of the remaining intervals.


Need to work on getting the pace below the previous run.