Threshold Intervals

The legs felt ok this morning. Ok, but not great. I took 15 minutes before breakfast and hammered my left IT band and TFL (Tensor Fascia Latae), problem spots for me, with a foam roller. I felt much better afterwards.

I was a bit nervous about today's workout: threshold intervals. Once again, I refer to Daniels:

Ti (Threshold Intervals): Sets of repeated miles at T-pace with 1-minute rests, up to 8% of week's total mileage or 10 km (whichever is less).

Again, I'm running 30 miles per week, so 8% would be 2.4 miles. I went a little crazy and rounded it up to 3 full miles. Next I had to look up my Threshold (T) pace in the Training Intensities Table. Using my estimated VDOT of 51, my T-pace is 6:44 per mile.

I decided to run these at the track. Even though the creek path has every half-mile marked, I was still worried about pacing correctly. At the track, it's just so easy to see if you're on pace every 100 meters. I also decided to run 1600-meter intervals, instead of a full mile. It's only 9 meters difference, and I can't seem to find the mile marker on the track anyway.

The first mile felt easy. I turned in 400-meter splits of 99.0, 100.6, 100.1, and 100.5 seconds, for a total of 6:40. A little fast, but no problem. By lap 3 of the second mile, I was starting to feel it. I was still running a bit fast, though, and came in at 6:39 this time. The last mile definitely felt hard, but I still finished in 6:40.

To me, this workout felt much more difficult than yesterday's. Now I'm wondering if I have overestimated my VDOT. If so, I'm running too fast. I just looked up Daniels' definition of T-pace:

"Subjectively, the intensity of effort associated with T-pace running is comfortably hard. The effort should be one that you could maintain for about one hour in a race."

I highly doubt I could run at 6:40 pace for a whole hour at this point in my training. So, maybe I'm running too fast. But for now, I'll just go with it and see what happens. With any luck, this workout should feel a little bit easier next time I do it.