15s workout

Today I added some speed work to my running. I haven't done anything fast all year (including the race I ran on Jan 1) and my average workout pace shows it. I didn't feel like driving out to the track today so I decided I would do an interval run. I set my watch up to beep every 15 seconds and set out for a 5 minute warm-up. At exactly 5 minutes, I picked up the pace to run as fast as I could maintain for 15 seconds and when the watched beeped, I would return to normal pace for 45 seconds. I then repeated this routine every minute until I was about 3 minutes from the finish and could cool down. Today, that meant I ran 18 repeats. By the end, I was not fully recovering between intervals, but I wasn't completely dead either. The key was to make sure my recovery pace wasn't too slow or the workout will end up taking longer than a normal run. I think I did pretty good today - I finished in 25:51 compared to 25:45 on Thursday for the same run at normal pace.

As I get stronger, I'll switch to 20 seconds of speed and only 40 seconds of recovery and really concentrate on the keeping the recovery pace. Hopefully after a few weeks of this, my speed will start to improve.

Today's Run 3.6 miles (YTD 251 miles)
Today's time 0:25:51 (YTD 32:32:58)
Weekly mileage 35.6 miles