Use It or Lose It

As I eluded to yesterday, my speed training has been pretty much non-existent for almost 2 years now. I've done some tempo runs but other than that, I can count on one hand the number of track workouts I've done since the beginning of 2006. The focus has been mainly on mileage and speed has taken a backseat. However, with two 5Ks coming up in July, I would like to take a shot at a sub 16 time, so I've decided to try and do at least one fast workout per week for the next 5-6 weeks to see if that helps. Today was the first one, and man, my rust showed.

The plan was to do as many 800 as I could in the time I had for lunch with a quarter mile rest interval in between each. With a busy afternoon at work ahead of me, the magic number turned out to be 7. I headed down to the lake with the Garmin programmed in for the workout and went to work. The goofy thing about going completely off the Garmin for a workout like this is that you don't know what kind of splits you're running any of the intervals in. It just shows you how much distance you have left in the segment that you are currently working on. When you complete the hard portion of the interval, it doesn't give you a time for it. It makes it kind of tough to make any sort of adjustments if you aren't hitting your target. I'm sure there is something I could input into the thing to get better feedback, but I haven't had the time or ambition to look into it.

So the workout wasn't too bad, although the first one felt unbelievably tough. After it was all said and done, my splits look like this: 2:48, 2:42, 2:33, 2:34, 2:31, 2:36, 2:36. Yeah I know. All over the place. Some of that is just me not being used to running fast, and some of it had to do with the conditions that the interval happened to coincide with. Since it was done on an out and back course on the lakefront, the first half of them were into the wind and the second half were with the wind at my back. The time pretty much prove that out. All in all, I guess I'm pleased with the workout, although I know the times need to be much faster if I want a legitimate shot at breaking 16 for a 5k. For now, I'm kind of writing them off to just lack of practice running at a near max effort. I guess next week will show if there's any validity in that theory.