Quick Speed Workout

On Friday (AKA "speed day"), I had a quick hard workout. I've been just doing my own sort of workouts (fartleks and 1-mile intervals), but I thought I'd branch off and do what the endurance coach from my gym posted on Facebook:

So I knew I shouldn't do 30 as I'd only had about 4 runs in the past many months that were over 40 minutes. So adding in a warm-up and cool-down to 30 mins of hard running would make this both a "speed" day and a "long run" day, which would be stupid. I also missed the "RECOVERY" word at the end of this - I remembered it saying "marathon pace" but I missed "recovery," so I kept all my "recovery" efforts at a pace decently faster than TRUE "recovery." That added to the overall workout, but just changed what I could do with the harder efforts.

I did my "go to" boring, straight, easy-to-socially-distance route:

I also wore a watch on each hand: my Garmin for pace and distance info, and my regular watch that I could easily set to beep every 30 seconds:

All sweaty post-run.

I told myself I'd do 20-25 of these. I cranked out 18 and knew I wasn't going to stop at 20. But after 22 (when I was about to start #23 heading up the base of a hill), I thought "yeah, I can be done now." That's the joy of training when you're coming back from a long time off: ANYTHING is better than nothing, and I don't have any big specific goals to be hitting at this point.

I had stopped my watch with 9 seconds left in the 44th interval (my 22nd rest after 22 efforts).


Funky looking Garmin data.

The first 2 intervals (starting after a 5:00 warm-up) get a little lost as I was doing a good job of not slowing up too much. But then I really started to ease up during the "off" times, so the peaks and valleys became more apparent.

And the zoomed-in Garmin data was interesting: the "on" times were a bit flatter (I'd get to pace and hold it) whereas the "off" times tended to make a sharp valley where I was at my slowest, and then I'd start to speed up again:

All in all, a decent workout to get in some fast bursts of speed!