Trudge mill.

The weather was cold and rainy today so I had to decide where to do the speedwork that was on the schedule. I thought it'd be a pain to do intervals on the roads / trails with my Garmin so I headed to the treadmill instead. I ended up using one of the older treadmills because the model at the gym has this nice feature where you can set up custom intervals. You enter the recovery speed and time, then the interval speed and time and the number of intervals. Today I entered:

Recovery speed: 6.7
Recovery time: 2:30
Interval speed: 9.3
Interval time: 6:30
# Intervals: 4

I started out with 3/4 of a mile of warmup at ~9:00 pace, then set the incline to 2.5% and started in with the first recovery period (you have to do the recovery first for some reason). Doing the intervals at 6:30 pace didn't feel too bad. I couldn't have gone too long at that pace but a mile wasn't bad. By the 3rd interval I was starting to struggle and my legs were getting tired. I kept up for all four, barely hanging on for the last one. Next I did a quick cool down, cleaned off the sweat I sprayed all over the machine and hit the showers.

I would have liked to do more than 4 x 1mi but I just don't have time for it at lunch. I need to see about hitting a local track before work some time soon to get the workout in and see how it feels to run 6:30 mile repeats on a track. Looking back at my training log, I was doing mile repeats at roughly this pace in 2003, only I did a few more of them. My log only goes back to 2000 but I remember preparing for the Portland marathon in 1998 and doing 11 x 1mi. I think I was doing them at 7:00 though. I remember that my pace was really in tune back then and I could run 8:00 miles by feel. I'd time myself and be within 2 or 3 seconds of 8:00 without looking at my watch until the end. That race still stands as my Marathon PR at 3:26:51.

No running tomorrow and hill repeats planned for Saturday if birthday preparations for a 3 year old aren't too time consuming. :)

Maybe now that I'm older and hopefully wiser, I'll have some restraint and run even intervals instead of trying to kill each one and get faster and faster.