Intervals – Gotta Love em!
February 4th, 2007
Normally on Sunday night I would write a weekly status report. I’ll hold off on that tonight, and write on tomorrow. Instead I thought I’d talk about my speed session I ran today at the Shoreline Stadium.
As I mentioned in my last post, I had intended to run this speed session Thursday night but I was thwarted by rain and mud. So I decided to try again today at a much nicer track. The Shoreline Stadium is a really nice facility. It has a rubberized track in excellent condition, a new high-quality synthetic infield, covered bleachers (did someone say Stairs Session? Yo! Adrienne!), bathrooms, the works… oh and did I mention a giant empty parking lot… and no other runners on the track? Nice!
My plan, as I described in my last post was to do what I call an interval pyramid. I don’t know if this is a term that other people use, but it seems reasonably descriptive to me. Basically I run work efforts of 400m, 800m, 1200m, 1600m, 1200m, 800m, and 400m. I run 400m recovery laps between the intervals. My goal is to run the 1600m interval at a “really really fast” pace, and make that my slowest interval. So the shorter intervals are intended to be faster than the longer ones.
I decided to pick a 6:30/mile pace for the slowest interval… This is about 1:30/mile faster than my goal Ironman run split pace and about 0:54/mile faster than my goal for my marathon pace. I’m not sure if these are reasonable speeds for interval training. If anyone reading this has suggestions on how to pick speed session paces let me know.
After picking my slowest pace, I had to pick a strategy for how much faster to run each shorter distance. I played around with increasing speed by 10% and 15%, and ended up deciding to do the 1200m at the same pace as the 1600, and then increase the 800m and 400m intervals at 10% faster paces.
So as I described last time, this means I was shooting to run a 1:20 – 400m, a 2:58 – 800m, 4:52-1200m, and 6:30 mile. Well, how did I do?
I ended up getting pretty close to my goals. I started out really strong. Ran the first 400 in exactly 1:20, the 800 in 2:59, the 1200 in 4:54, the mile in 6:36… then I got a little slower and ran the declining intervals at: 5:00, 3:05, and 1:26. I had solid efforts in each of my work intervals reaching 175bpm (~87.5% max). I good recoveries in each recovery lap returning to about 130bpm (~65% max).
All in all, this kicked my butt… I mean this was a hard workout. I basically ran 4 miles of work effort at a sub 6:30 pace… That’s pretty solid for me. I had a great time. I felt strong, and really enjoyed myself.
I hope to run this kind of a workout once a week… or at least once every other week. Coupled with a long run and another tempo run, I feel like I will be on a great path to achieve my run performance goals.
Entry Filed under: Living Seattle, Fitness, Triathlon, Ironman, Running, Marathons
5 Comments Add your own
1. ZappoMan.wordpress.com - &hellip | February 4th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
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2. IronMed | February 5th, 2007 at 4:20 am
Zappo, sounds like you had a good workout. I use this site as a guide to what paces I should be running at. I couple it with info from Daniel’s Running Formula. Works pretty well for me.
http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/rununiv/mcmillanrunningcalculator.htm
Have a good week. I’ve got exams this week so we’ll see how that goes.
3. Karl McCracken | February 5th, 2007 at 6:38 am
Hi -
Intervals . . . on a track (going round and round) . . . all alone. Boy, you really know how to play the mind games with yourself, don’t you!
You might find it a lot easier to hit those second half goals if you can schedule these sessions with some other runners - my own interval performance absolutely sucks when I’m alone, but put me in a group . . .
Ayway. What you have here looks really impressive - especially the DATA you’ve captured (what toy do you use for this?), which shows exactly why interval training is so effective - just look at the way your HR recovers at the beginning of the session, compared with at the end. It’s also interesting to see that your speed always peaks toward the end of each interval. (Are you by any chance particularly goal-oriented?)
Karl.
4. zappoman | February 5th, 2007 at 11:25 am
IronMed - Thanks for the pointer to the running calculator.
Karl - Yes, speed sessions with a group is MUCH BETTER… but alas, I couldn’t get my timing to work out this week. I was going to run with my friend Lisa and a couple of her running friends, but we couldn’t get our schedules to work out. Maybe next week.
Oh and my gadget for this run was my Garmin Forerunner 305. It’s pretty cool. And yes… I was trying to run a steady pace, but as I come around that last corner, if I’m behind on my goal, I am going to push it out! I am a wee bit competitive.
5. Lisa | February 5th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Good work out, If you are shooting for a 3:30 marathon pace, that puts you at around 7:30 for half-marathon, 400m at around 1:30, you came in around 1:20, 2:59 for 800 is pretty fast. It looks like you may be faster than you realize. There is a theory from Bart Yazzo, that predicts marathon times based on 800 meter repeats. Supposedly, if you can do consistent 800 meter repeats at 3:00 (which means about 8 - 10 in a workout) then you are capable of a 3:00 hour marathon. I’m not sure how fast you would be at the end of an ironman though.
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