Last week’s interval session was mediocre at best, so I was a little apprehensive before this week’s episode.  I was comforted somewhat by the lack of 800m intervals in the plan this week.  In fact, this week called for 10-12 400m intervals at R pace.  Fortunately for me, there’s also the stipulation of no more than 5% of the week’s total mileage at R pace.  With a planned 36 total miles again this week, that made for 7 400 m intervals planned for today.

Life has been pretty stressful lately.  Bootstrapping a project like Digital Running is like high stakes gambling.  It’s all a balance of risk versus reward.  Of course at this stage it’s all risk and no reward.  I’ve only got so much time in the day and I’m working on multiple projects.  I wish I had the funds to hire someone to program the whole thing for me, but I refuse to take on venture capital at this point (it’s my baby and I don’t want to give up any control right now…though it may come to that in the end).  That may work out nicely in the long term, but sometimes I think it would be easier to just take the cash to the casino and play poker.

In any case, I woke in a pretty crumby mood and not all that excited at the prospect of running 400m intervals.  I fired up the Napster account and played some inspiring music for a while, then finally convinced myself to get out the door.  My warm-up mile was okay, and I got to the park feeling a little better.  I ran to the marked “start” of the 1.1 mile loop and hung out for a second while a lady with a hyper dog got out of my way.  The 400 m intervals were planned for 94 seconds each with 400 m jogs in between.  I ran sets of 2 with a 400 m jog within the set and a 600 m jog in between sets just because of the way the park is laid out.  Here’s how they went:

400 m : 88s

400m: 90s

400m: 89s

400m: 89s

400m: 84s

400m: 89s

400m: 85s

Including warm-up, cool-down and jogs in between intervals, the whole workout wound up being 6 miles in 47:01.  It felt really nice and cured my bad mood.  Incidentally, my daughter had her first “specialty” day at track practice today.  She said her coach tried to get her to run the 400, but she intentionally ran it slow so she wouldn’t have to run it the rest of the season.  She wants to do the 800 and the mile.  I was like “Screw the 800, run the 400!”.  Needless to say, I’m with Jess and I’m not that into the 800 m intervals.

I’ll be back at the gym tomorrow and have a threshold workout planned for Wednesday.