New territory

Today I went over to the gym at lunch for some speedwork on the hamster wheel. I noticed the other day that they finally installed consoles on the new treadmills so I wanted to try them. The old treadmills have a nice setting where you can define your own interval workout using time, speed, and # of repeats. After some trial and error I found that the new consoles can almost do the same thing but not quite. You can set up intervals but only using speed an incline. I couldn't figure out how to tell it how far they should be (400m) or how many (10).

I gave up and just used the manual setting instead. One nice feature that the new consoles have is an image of a track with a green dot representing you that circles the track. This made it much easier to do the repeats. One lap for green dot man at target pace and I back it off to recovery pace for 3/4 of a lap.

Always pressed for time, I did an abbreviated 5min. warm-up at 9:30 pace. I ran 10 x 1/4mi at 82 seconds with 3/4 of a lap (0.18 miles) recovery at 9:30/mi.

This is the first time I've done intervals below a 6:00/mi. pace. I thought that I could handle a 5:28/mi. pace for short intervals. I did pretty well, starting out with a 1.5% incline. After the first five my legs started to really feel heavy. I the leg workout I did yesterday might be part of the reason. I dropped the incline to 0% and squeaked out the remaining 5 repeats. I was unfortunately one of "those guys" at the gym who was breathing really hard / gasping for air during the last 20 seconds of each effort. I hope it didn't annoy the other hamsters pushing their wheels around me.

I don't think I could have done this workout on a track. Maybe 87 - 90 sec. per 400m. but not 82. When you do them on a treadmill the moving band/tread just helps enough that you can keep going a bit longer at the in-over-your-head pace.

Good workout overall.

5.5 miles
~38 min.


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