Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Intervals, Intervals, Intervals

Yeah, I don't have any stories about an epic ride or X number of laps in the pool. The past few weeks have all been about intervals aimed at increasing speed. Nearly all of my races are sprint distance races that last just around an hour. I really miss the 4-5 hour rides and 3 hour runs that came with training for an Ironman distance race, but the sprint distance is a whole different monster and requires different training.

Here's what yesterday looked like:

Run:
1 mile warm up
800 m in 2:56
400 jog
800 m in 2:54
400 jog
800 m in 2:55
400 jog
800 m in 3:00
400 jog
2 miles at 6:51 pace
1 mile jog.

Not a long workout at all, maybe 6.5 miles? But it was a great workout and definitely stretched my limits.

Today we did time trial intervals on a semi-flat course that was just under 1 mile long. I didn't have my garmin with me so I didn't get any splits. The goal here was to make it hurt. Dr. Nitrous and I swapped off acting as rabbits for one another giving us someone to try and catch. There's a little pride that's lost in being caught so there was some extra motivation keep the speed up. We conducted 6 TT sessions that have left my quads still burning 3 hours later. It's either a sign that I'm just not in peak form right now, or that this was just a good workout.

Tomorrow is a 5K run at 100% effort. I'm going to try and break my previous PR of 19:46 on this course. I'm not sure if I'm there yet, but we'll find out. More on that later.

This weekend is the 1st Annual LibertyMan Duathlon. It's a practice race created by the good Dr. Nitrous. It consists of a 5K run, 14 mile bike, 5k run. This is going to be a real challenge for me, especially in trying to keep the pace hot. Looking forward to throwing down and earning my stripes.