Getting faster

One good thing about interval workouts is that they can be easily compared. Sort of. If you do the exact same workout under exactly the same conditions, including weather, wind, and state of recovery, you can tell whether you're getting faster or not. Of course, you'll never repeat two workouts under the exact same conditions, but you can get close enough.

Today's interval workout was similar in some ways to workouts I've done before, but different enough that it's a little hard to compare. It had two phases: 1) a VO2 max interval phase, and 2) a Repetition phase. That's not counting my warmup and cooldown.

For the first phase, I decided to run 3 x 1000 meters with 3 minutes rest. This is a change from my previous 5 x 1000 with 1:30 rest. I switched to only 3 intervals because this was my 2nd interval session of the week, and Daniels recommends no more than 6% of total weekly mileage for this session. That would be 2.9 km, so I rounded up to 3000 meters. I also increased my recovery period based on Daniels recommendation that recoveries "should be equal to, or a little less than, the time spent performing the preceding workbout." I had a hard time running 3:55's on Tuesday with only 1:30 rest (in fact I couldn't do it), so I decided to see what I could do when following the recommendation.

How did it go?

Fantastic. I ran my 1000s in 3:52.9, 3:50.5, and 3:53.3. More importantly, I never felt stressed to my limits, as I did on Tuesday. I am sure I could have completed two more at that pace. I wasn't really trying to beat 3:55 by that much; I was just trying to maintain pace in a controlled way to the finish of each interval.

Following the VO2 max interval phase of the workout, Daniels recommended 4-6 x 200 at R-pace, which should be around 44 seconds for me (I'm still guessing that my VDOT is anywhere from 48-50 right now). These reps felt good as well, and I ran them a little fast at 41.4, 41.9, 42.0, and 41.3 seconds.

In spite of feeling great about today's workout, I got home and felt pretty trashed. In retrospect I think I accidentally allowed myself to get dehydrated in the record heat. It got to be around 80 degrees today, and I started my run in the heat of the day at 1:15 PM. Perhaps not too smart, but I told myself it would be good for heat acclimatization.