Getting back on the speed track

I went out for my intervals run yesterday as part of the speed work I planned for the San Francisco Half Marathon. The last time I did intervals was three weeks ago so I'm really behind. I got really sick for a week then I had finals which screwed up my sleeping and eating schedule. In other words, LIFE got in the way of my training! I definitely felt it during the run. Half way through I wanted to quit really badly but I pushed it through even though I did not feel very strong. It's worth it though as evident by the soreness I still feel in my quads.

I did quite a bit of reading on speed training prior to planning out my training program. Tempo and hill runs are pretty straight forward, but intervals are complicated. Trying to figure out the mixture of different distances (200, 400, 800, even 1000) and my 5K/10K/half pace was really confusing as every article had a different opinion. In the end I took the easy way out and just used the ones suggested in this article. I do it once a week, and since I'm a newbie at this I started with a subset of the workout and add to it every week. I also do a tempo run and a long run, plus two days of core training. It all looked really good on my computer screen, but trying to stick to it was hard! Now that the weather is getting better and I'm starting a new quarter with fewer classes, I hope I'll do a better job of committing to the training.

Yesterday's intervals was 3x400 3x200 3x400 3x200. In other words, 3 repeats of 400m followed by 3 repeats of 200m and so on. For the 400m run I try to stick with a 9:30 minutes-per-mile pace. For the 200m run I try to stick with a 8:30 minutes-per-mile pace. I find it hard to run the 8:30-mpm pace for the 200m because it's hard to look at my watch when I'm going fast. So I just kind of do it by feel and often end up going over the intended pace. I love the feeling of swinging my arms to help propel my body forward aggressively - the 200m runs are my favorite.

The reds are when I ran slower than the intended pace, the blues are when I went overboard.

Next week I'm adding another set so it'll be 4x400 4x200 4x400 4x200. My brother suggested that I add some 40-60m sprints in there. I don't know how I'm going to have any energy left for that! Maybe I should bring a puke bucket.

Happy running!