Hello Speed Work!

Saturday was the first day of speed work on my new training plan. Kelly and I ran on a paved trails, which meant a few hills and turns, but no interruptions from traffic. The plan called for 8x400 with 400 rest interval. Ugh. I wasn't sure where to start, so I set 7:15-7:20 min/mi as my goal pace.

I set a workout in my Garmin, but I need to manually adjust it. The pre-set paces had a 7:00-9:00 category, but it kept telling me to slow down and we did all the intervals between a 7:13 and 7:47 pace. The 7:47 was a fluke, I was still listening to the Garmin and slowing down. After #2, we decided to ignore the "Slow Down!" warnings and keep running. Other than the one 7:47, the rest were between 7:13 and 7:21. That pace was about perfect. The first few were fairly easy, but by #6 - #8, I was really pushing to keep the pace up. The last one was 7:15 exactly and got my HR up to 180 bpm.

I like the HR graph from the workout. I can clearly see the 8 intervals with the rest in between. Pretty cool. We did 6 mi in 51 min and there was even a little walking. After the last few intervals, I walked until my HR dropped below 170 bpm. So far, so good. We'll see how I fare on my tempo run tomorrow.