Report on wednesday's intervals

Wednesday's intervals have come and gone and I still feel pretty good. I'm just about back from the hamstring problem.

7 miles including 5X4' hard 3' easy with warm up and cool down.

Started cautiously at 6:50 then progressed a bit quicker to 6:40, 6:29, 6:22, 6:19. The target was 6:20 to 6:30 so I got there in the last 3 intervals.

Looking back at why I had a problem, here is the chain of events that preceded the issue:

I had been running really strong for several weeks (~35 mpw) and had hit all of my goals in the intervals.

Most of my interval sessions were on a treadmill where I could set the speed exactly where I wanted to.

I was on the holiday break from work so I didn't have the same treadmill available.

My exercise patterns were slightly disrupted.

I was running on the track at the Livonia Rec center on that particular day.

I didn't feel particularly strong that day, most likely cuz I had just woken up ~3 hours before and had been fairly inactive.

I didn't feel warmed up that day but had done my normal amount of warm up at 15min.

I struggled to meet the speed required for the intervals on the first two of 5X4'(2')

I just ran the next two as hard as I could even though they were slower than prescribed.

I noticed a slight pain in the back of my right leg after the second interval, kind of ignored it cuz intervals hurt anyway.

I jogged the last one cuz I couldn't make the pace.

Cooled down normally and still had the pain in my right leg.

Just a note on how I know the pace...I have a Garmin 310xt and the footpod that goes with it. That gives me run speed while indoors but on the track it reads kind of funny depending on which way we run around the track and how I'm running that day. Since it's only on one foot it appears to record the distance of that one leg and assumes the other leg is taking about the same size step, that's not necessarily true all of the time.

The way I adjust the pace for that inconsistency is that I know the track is 10 laps to a mile, on warm up I look at how the watch tracks to the number of laps, that day it was reading low, I don't really know why. With the interval function of the watch it doesn't count out miles and I was doing 15 min warm up and didn't really pay attention to how it tracked that day, it could have been 1.9 miles and only counted 1.8 miles which would put it way off for that day.

I started the intervals very aggressively mainly cuz I had done them quite a bit with good success (this is the hardest of the VO2 interval sets) but should have eased into them a little bit. Combined with the watch being slightly off and me not really warmed up I probably started off way to fast, maybe as fast as 6:10 which is really too fast for me.

With that in mind it's apparent the I didn't warm up enough, started off too hard, and ran much too fast that day. Those things were what I was trying to avoid yesterday and it appears I did a much better job.