Bike Intervals (sucked) and Track Intervals (rocked)

I'm thinking about doing a race this upcoming weekend. The thought of that made me go out and have 2 solid back-to-back training days on Thursday and Friday last week.

On Thursday, I got outside for a ride for only the 4th time this year. (I've been on the trainer a lot, but I haven't been doing a ton of effort.) I was going to do 3x4 mile intervals. In the past, I've OFTEN done 3x5 mile intervals, but they are still working on the Greenway Trail out by the Nordicware factory, so it would be MUCH less complicated to just do 4 mile intervals.

After a few miles of warming up, I went hard. It was into the wind, which was probably good for me (I was used to no wind on the trainer so much this spring). Post-ride, my Garmin told me it was a 15 mph wind out of the SW. It felt brutal looking at 19.x on my Garmin for the entire first interval while working HARD. Here were my interval averages:

• 19.4 mph (19.1 halfway), into the wind
• 22.0 mph (20.7 halfway), with the wind
• 19.8 mph (19.9 halfway), into the wind

Being it was a "sporadic" interval session with some not fast intervals into the wind, it was a bit hard to see my intervals on my Garmin pace graph:

With the wind on the way home, so you can see part
of my "cool down" was pretty moderate and fast.

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On Friday, I hit the track early for some running intervals. Being I was thinking about racing in 8-9 days, I figured I should make them shorter and more "snappy." The running coach on my YWCA team posted the workout the team was doing the day before, and it sounded good to me:

So that was my plan! I figured I'd be faster than "prescribed" (as I usually am when it comes to intervals) as a 10k pace 800 would be 2:55-3:00 for me, and a 5k pace 400 would be 1:25.

I NAILED SOME NICE DESCENDING NUMBERS! Here were my 400 splits:

800s:
1:22.97, 1:22.22 = 2:45.19
1:21.07, 1:19.97 = 2:41.04
1:19.55, 1:18.25 = 2:37.80
1:19.00, 1:18.02 = 2:37.03

400s:
1:15.97
1:15.17
1:14.27
1:14.00

After the 3rd 800, I didn't know if I'd be able to hold on, so I told myself there was no need to try to keep descending, but then I was able to still descend the final 800 by 3/4 of a second. (So b-a-r-e-l-y.) And I was able to keep the descend going through the 400s as well. Here's my Garmin map of my workout, and you can see where I walked back on the track after and before each interval as I was sipping on my water:

4x800, and 4x400. Pretty easy to discern.

I was REALLY happy with that workout. Good effort and good results!!