Coach Kelly Kicked my Ass

FASTER!!

Saturday morning Coach Kelly came with me for 400 intervals. Well, that was the plan anyway. We went to a high school except the track is under construction and in nothing more than a giant mud ring. Plan B was an asphalt "track" at an elementary school, which wasn't really a track at all. In fact, each loop was 0.15 mi, which makes 400 intervals a little tough. So my 400s became 0.3 mi intervals.

You know you have a good friend when she's willing to come watch and time intervals, especially when she's recovering from surgery. I've written before how Kelly is great at motivating me when we run intervals and I'm 1/2 block back wheezing while she's breezing up a hill. This time she was motivating me running around a track and wheezing while she was drinking coffee. She had the better end of this deal. I think our running relationship just hit S&M status.

The intervals were tough. My plan was 1:50 1/4 mile intervals, which would have been about a 7 min/mi pace. Well who can do pace splits for 0.3 mi in their head? Not Kelly or me, so we settled on 1:50-ish for the 0.3 miles. I was originally going to do 8 but in the humidity and after wasting time trying to find a replacement track, I could only do 6 and felt a little disappointed in myself. But after converting lap times to paces, I'm actually quite surprised at my splits.

Here's the lap times: 1:45/1:57/1:57/2:01/2:00/2:00. Ok, sure, whatever. I was wiped out the rest of the day and my quads and hamstrings are tight today. I converted that into min/mi paces and those look much more impressive: 5:50/6:30/6:30/6:43/6:40/6:40. I will take sub-7 min splits, especially in that humidity. I guess I'll have to stick with Coach!