After my aborted attempt at an interval run on Monday I tried again this morning.
It was about 9 degrees but I deliberately chose shorts and a t-shirt after being way too hot on my last few runs. It was chilly to start with and there was a stiff breeze, but I quickly warmed up once I began to run.
I had set up a workout in Garmin of 60 second runs, with a target pace of around 7.30/km - which is fast for me - followed by 90 second recovery jog/walk intervals. This was supposed to be a 4k run, but I had no idea how many intervals that would take up so I decided to set a large number of repeats and just stop the workout when the 4k was up.
In the end it didn't quite work out like that as 4k coincided with a recovery interval, so I decided to carry on and do one more 60 second run, making the run just over 4.2k, with Strava stealing a little bit from me after the synch.
I actually quite enjoyed this run, in a weird, slightly masochistic kind of a way. But there were also things I didn't like or enjoy about it.
I was running on the road again as I know the unmade roads and trails will still be really muddy.
After the first interval I quickly realised that if I actually wanted to "recover" I would need to walk the recovery jogs. Maybe next time I try this I'll be able to actually jog them.
I didn't enjoy the continual change of pace and lack of rhythm, although overall the run did have it's own weird cyclic repetition.
I struggled to discover if I was actually running at the target pace I'd set, other than continually checking my watch. It kept buzzing on my wrist, but there are other alerts that have nothing to do with the workout when the watch also buzzes. In the end I decided to ignore target pace and just run "fast" in the run intervals. (double quotes fully intentional π)
At the end, when I looked at the stats in Garmin, it gives me the lap times for each interval. Yes - I guess that's logical, but how on earth do I properly work out my time for the 4k? Strava presents the splits in the normal way.
Anyway, the combination of walking and running gave me a personal records for a mile and 2 miles along with my second fastest 0.5k and 1k. My average pace over the whole run was 7.43/km. The only other time I've achieved anything like that was on a short 2.5k run using the C25K+ Speed podcast.
My next run wont be until the weekend now, hopefully on Saturday. This will be an 8k. I'm not going to attempt a longer run on a workday again as the last one was way too rushed.