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.
glad to here about the intervals going so well. i totally understand about not wanting to give over control to a programmer right now. i have a few experiments that my boss would like me to leave the repeats for one of the other students to do. that would make it possible to get that student on the paper as a second author and allow me to get all of the work repeated in another stage of the life cycle. I know it makes sense and will get my thesis out the door faster, but like you said it’s my baby and i’m just not willing to let it go yet.
definitely the 400. just one lap. i can run my brains out for one lap. two laps (or four) on the other hand… gross. but that mile is the glamorous distance in track now isn’t it. nice job on your intervals and glad they went better than last week! you sure sound strong and fast to me.
I had a coach that wanted me to do the 400 too! Jerk, he was.
Nice job on those intervals. All fast and all under goal time 🙂