OK, this is good, I had an excellent workout with M. this evening. Warmed up beforehand with 1+ treadmill mile, then did a good 20-25-minute treadmill interval workout with him pushing the buttons and finished out the rest of the hour with the usual core and upper-body stuff.
I have been having very poor running morale - not poor in terms of the thing itself, in fact I am very pleased and relieved to have switched over from triathlon to marathon training for the rest of the season, and I am always enjoying running both in theory and in practice. (Especially after the run is over!)
But I have been having a very bad mental state of feeling again like the slowest runner in the world (I have already dwelled here on the reasons - lost fast running partner S. - high mental and physical comfort level with exclusively zone 2 training - New York summer weather - etc. etc.), and of course if you feel like that it is very hard to persuade yourself to go out and do harder/faster workouts...
This was a very good mental boost. In fact the intervals were really all too short to be doing anything much physically for marathon training. But the mental benefits seem to me enormous. The last bit we did was 5 x 30 seconds run and 30 seconds rest at 8.5mph (which this handy chart tells me is 7:05 pace), with the last one of the five at 9.0mph (6:40).
I was, like, OH! Really I am not the slowest runner in the world, I could have some fast running goals again - I need to just put in the miles for marathon training, but I can be doing some stuff that will make me be able to run a fast mile also. Like it would not be impossible to say that I have a goal for 2009 of running a (horrible & couldn't possibly run even a hair faster if someone held a gun to my head) sub-7:00 timed mile under race-like conditions... I do not know if I can actually quite get it down that low, but I certainly should be able to run an uncomfortable but tolerable 7:30 mile, this is ridiculous, time for me to start doing some faster workouts! Because doing regular couple-minute intervals at 7:30 pace is what makes 8:20 become a lovely hard but comfortable tempo pace!
3 miles total plus gym stuff
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3 comments:
Certainly if you're running 8.5-9mph on the treadmill, even for a very short period of time, you are NOT the slowest runner in the world.
But what I found most interesting about your post were the many parallels with how I felt (past tense) about my swimming!
Of course you're not the Slowest Runner In The World!
Well, I'm definitely one of the slowest runners - and I'm going to use your advice and so some intervals - I tend to do too much - long and slow stuff myself. Maybe that's the advantage of using a treadmill - can't cheat.
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