12x400 at the Track

I love and hate this workout.

I thought it had been a while since I'd done this one, but it turns out it had only been 6 weeks. I had completely blocked doing this at the end of February. I WAS aware that I did this workout and called it my "best interval workout ever" a year ago.

This workout is 12x400 done as 3x(4x400). There's just 60 secs between the 400s, but 3:00 rest between the 3 sets. I didn't remember the 1/10s of second, but I knew my 3 sets from a year ago were 1:14, 1:14, and 1:13. I didn't have plans to beat those, but I knew those numbers as the BEST version ever of this workout.

I started decent with a 1:17. That's still slow, but I generally descend these. I was pretty happy with my first set averaging 1:15.6:

1:17.5, 1:15.3, 1:15.5, 1:14.2 = 1:15.6 average

For the 2nd set, I kept track of how many 1/10s of a sec I was over 1:15, and I was quickly in the negative, meaning I was averaging better than 1:15. I was quite happy with this:

1:15.5, 1:13.7, 1:12.9, 1:13.9 = 1:14.0 average

Now I wondered if I could average 1:13, so I again kept track of these as I went. I was still just over 1:13 ave after the first 2, but then final 2 knocked my average down nicely:

1:14.3, 1:12.1, 1:10.9, 1:10.4 = 1:11.9 average

This was substantially faster than this workout 6 weeks ago (each set of 3 averaged 1-2 secs faster this time), and it's TECHNICALLY faster than that "best ever" workout from last year! But I had a smaller spread last year, as I started slower this year and built to a faster time. (Last year, the 3 sets averaged 1:14.0, and this year, they averaged 1:13.8.)

Pace tells the story. HR has NOT been reading correctly (my last 4 were HIGHER than 140!).

My quads were HEAVY in the final 2 intervals! This was a good workout.

And then I banged out a decent bike ride the following day.