Trying a New Speed Workout

My team coach posted this for the group workout last week, and I thought I'd try it on the treadmill on my own:

I was going to shoot for a faster "hard" pace (more like 5K speed and not 10K speed), and then jog for the minute between. I knew it could have its own issues being our treadmill doesn't get up to speed very fast, but it could still be a fun effort.

I ran the efforts starting at 10.6 mph, and ended most of them after 2 mins at 10.8 mph. About 6 or 7 intervals in, I started at 10.7 mph. The last few I started at 10.8 mph, and would bump up to 10.9 mph. I never got up to 11.0 mph - I know I COULD have, but this was the first time trying this and I wanted to be a little cautious. And I ran all of my 1 min easy efforts at 7.6 mph. After 12, it my screen looked like this:

Graphs showing 2 mins at 10+ mph and then 1 min at 7+ mph. (You only
see 10 here because it just shows 30 mins - 2 had already scrolled off.)


What you'd expect to see out of pace and heart rate.


And as always, my cadence is a bit better (higher) when I run faster.

Overall, the 3 min intervals (of 2 mins hard and 1 min easy) had me NEARLY cover a half mile - my half mile splits throughout this workout started at 3:08 and dropped to 3:03 as I generally sped up the farther I got through this workout.

So I ran the middle 5.5 miles in 34:05, which is 6:11.8/mile average for the guts of this workout. That's just a BIT faster than I usually do my "pace miles" in the middle of a long run, so I'm thinking this could be a fun way to mix up my long runs. It felt more like "distance" intervals than it did short/hard/fast intervals - I finished and felt more like I did after 2x2 mile intervals than I did after any track workout. So I might use this idea in the middle of my long runs as a way to mix those up in the future.