Intervals
Tonight I ended up doing a very late, very dark set of intervals for about 6.25 miles. I did a warmup and then ran a 3 minutes fast, 2 minutes slow pattern around the park loop. It felt good, but I was careful not to run the fast ones too fast - especially in the dark. Nobody else was out, which made it easier, although one house overlooking the park has a very bright back yard light: I had to close one eye as I passed it in order to maintain some vision on the other side. Other than that, pretty uneventful.
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Jan 28th 2005
1:07 PM
Richard, I have a question to ask you about Interval workouts. I haven’t yet found one that works for me. Can you help? My pace right now is about 11:30/mile (I know it sucks). I’d like to do a 3 mile interval workout and work up to 5. My long runs are at a 12:00 pace for 6 miles. Any suggestions?
Jan 28th 2005
1:22 PM
The McMillan calculator can really help here, especially on a treadmill - there’s a link on the main page. It has recommended paces for interval training based on your current performance.
More generically, it takes a bit of practice. I would start out by doing, say, a one mile warmup ending up at a high-school track. Then do a timed lap (400m) “pretty hard” (faster than a 5K race). Walk half a lap to recover, and repeat. Try to do 4-6 of these. End with a slow mile to cool down.
The goal is to have all of your intervals be the same speed. This will not happen the first time, so don’t worry about it if it doesn’t.
Another fun thing to do is to not worry about timing and do fartlek runs outside - during a medium run (ie: not a new distance record) intersperse short, hard runs of 200-400m to landmarks (street signs, bridges, what have you). Those can be much easier to handle, and still give you the benefits of going anerobic.