Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Speed workout, long time no see. I missed you.

Last night was supposed to be an easy 3 miles. When I got off work it was 92 degrees with 25 mph winds. I was sweating in my car driving home from work. UGH. Apparently we were 2 measly degrees from breaking the temp record yesterday. Darn. Anyway, because of the elements, I decided to head to my gym, and switch out my quarter mile repeat workout. My love. :) If you've been following along at home, I stopped doing sprint workouts after the Washington Pavilion 5k because my stupid strained ab was still, well, strained, and I knew the speed work, specifically the sprinting part of the speed work, was causing it to not heal. That means the last sprint/speed workout I did was April 15th! I looked at my running log and decided I would run them at the same pace I did then, and scale back/stop if the ab started to hurt.

IT. WAS. AWESOME. I felt like I was flying (especially since I was on the treadmill). I did 6 x .25 at roughly mile pace, with a .1 walk break in between. I warmed up with .5 and cooled down with a .5. The best news was, I didn't hurt. At all. :)

.5 warm up 4:30/9:00 pace
.25 1:43/6:52 pace (2 at this pace)
.25 1:42/6:48 pace (2 at this pace)
.25 1:41/6:44 pace
.25 1:30/6:35 pace
.5 cool down 4:30/9:00 pace

Avg. pace for sprints 6:46, warm up/cool down 9:00.

I'm also excited because these felt (dare I say it) easy. Granted the last couple had me huffing and puffing, but I remember being much more labored on these a couple of months ago. Assuming the pain doesn't come back, I think I'll be bumping up the speed a bit. YAY!

This also makes me think that I could do another race before June 27th (the next one I have on my list). There is a 5k on May 30th put on by the Canaries/Roller Dollz, and another 5k on June 6th for SIDS research. 5 more weeks is a looooong time to wait to race, so we'll see. Luckily these are races that you can sign up the night before and still get the low low rate.

Today's weather is pretty similar to yesterday's, except more wind. Ya, seriously. It might be another gym day because somehow easy does not equal sweating my behind off while fighting hurricane like winds (or so I'm guessing since we don't have hurricanes here, obv). Then I get to watch the bf's team kick some softball booty. Go T-bagz. (Um..ya.)

6 comments:

Jamie said...

Great job on the speedwork! Glad to hear you had no pain and they felt easier! Hope you are healed and ready to push it even more :)

J said...

So glad the speed workout was easy for you! Sometimes it just works out that way and it is great! I think that running 5ks every few weeks is fun because its not a lot of distance and doesn't take that long to recover!

Mica said...

Awesome speed workout!

Kim said...

I've got to start doing speed workouts. They sound like a lot of fun! Or maybe you just make it sound like fun since you were totally kicking butt? :P

I am the same way about races. Ideally, I'd do one every 2-3 weeks. They are so addicting!

J said...

Whoa! That is some serious speed! Sub-7:00?!?! Nice.

x's and o's said...

your blog is a veritable cornucopia of running long distances. Mine is more random and with few followers. Meh, I will not compete with you on this one.