Today was the first day that I have actually done Speedwork in a long time. I wasn’t really sure that I would do it or not this morning, but with the wind chills below zero, I was not going to run outside. Which meant a trip to run on the treadmill again.
The winds were the biggest problem today, if it hadn’t been for that, I think I would have run outside. Unfortunately, the 15-20 mph steady breeze was just too much to play around in – even Bennie thought it was cold out there.
He found a spot on the couch where I had my heating pad on earlier and relaxed a bit. It looks like he is saying “quit bugging and let me get back to that dream I was having.”
That is how I left him when I took off to my clandestine meeting with the Planet Fitness treadmill.
One thing that is very strange, yeah it is rather odd that I love short intervals – that old sprinter in me dies harder than I thought. I am very weird in that I love to run fast for short distances and the more I thought about doing Speedwork today, the more I thought that I should do something that I do like to do. So I decided to do tenth of a mile fast intervals with a tenth of a mile recovery.
I figured that I would do 10 or so repeats and call it quits. Well needless to say that is not what happened.
When I finished the tenth one, I was feeling really good and kept going and kept going and kept going. There is something about me and short/fast runs – I love them and they don’t fatigue me like quarters, halves, klics or miles. I really could have kept going, but decided to stop while I was feeling great.
One helluva confidence builder!
Yeah I “warmed-up” at for .90 mile @ 7.6 mph and then proceeded to do 20 x .1 intervals at 9.0 mph with .1 recovery at 7.0 mph, with one more (the last one .1 @ 9.5 mph). Needless to say, I set my 2018 5.0 mile treadmill personal best pretty easily. Maybe someday, I should do a 5K race using this kind of a plan – although it would probably piss off some of the other runners though as we would pass one another all too often. It certainly wouldn’t be a consistent pace.
Now I know that I am not really in that kind of shape and that the treadmill does help me a quite bit on the speed side of things, but daaaammmn, that exceeded anything that I thought that I could/would/should do for my first repeat session of the season. At no point did I feel overly fatigued or unable to finish a repeat easily. Actually some of the recovery repeats were harder for me than the running faster.
Now in reality this workout does not relate to how I will run outside, it is simply a speed workout where I got to stretch my legs a bit more than usual.
Who knows maybe there is still some pop left in the old legs, but now to get them in shape for that non-motorized running outside 🙂
Harold Being Harold 
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