Tuesdays are my weekly speed training day and this week the plan called for 4 x .75 @ 5K race pace.

Yeah, that was the plan. 😉

However, I got a bad case of Harold being Harold and wanted to try out a new pair of running shoes that have been sitting on my dresser for a couple of weeks. Especially, after I took them out of the wrapper yesterday, tried them on, weighed them and was suitably impressed.

Now I am planning on these shoes being my go fast for me shoes and in order to test them out, I decided in my infinite wisdom to use them for my Tuesday speed work session but didn’t want to do the longer repeats originally in the plan. So I decided to do my “go to” workout 12 x .25 @ 5K race pace.

With the understanding that if the new shoes bothered that I could stop the workout and change to my other shoes that I would bring with me.

I also was going to set up my Garmin 230 to timed Intervals and let it tell me when to do my repeats. It was a great plan, but one that failed miserably, once I started the watch, I noticed that the distance was waaaay off. Yes, it was set to Indoor mode, but for some reason, it attempted to use the GPS too.

So I paused the treadmill, adjusted the laces and restarted the watch – it did it again, after that, I just ignored the watch and went by the treadmill display.

However, I went ahead and changed up the workout slightly and made it harder. Yeah, I know – new shoes and a harder than usual speed workout.

Yeah, you really were Harold being Harold today.

What did I end up doing?

• 1.0 @ 6.7 mph for a warm-up
• Recoveries after each fast .25 was 6.5 mph.
• 4 x .25 @ 8.7 mph, with that pause to try to get the watch working correctly, slightly faster than what I would like to run for a 5K
• 4 x .25 @ 8.9 mph – a little more difficult, but doable, but the recoveries felt pretty short
• 4 x .25 @ 9.1 mph – actually I felt smoother running at this speed, but the recoveries seemed way too short

At this point, I looked like I had gone swimming or running in the rain, but I was still feeling pretty strong, so I decided to make this workout even harder. What a dumbshit! Like twelve quarter-mile repeats at increasing speeds were not enough.

Time for strides.

• 5 x .1 @ 9.6 mph – my treadmill strides distance
• 1 x .1 @ 10.1 mph – yeah that one sucked!

8.0 miles total in 60:42 or as close as I could figure.

One of those workouts that I kept changing on the fly since I was feeling pretty good throughout and wanted to test the new shoes to see how they would when I was tired and still attempting to run fast. Surprisingly, I felt better with each mile I ran in them, even though I was getting pretty tired.

I didn’t get any hotspots and my feet did not bother or hurt. Although I did have to adjust the lacing when I paused the treadmill and still have some minor adjustments to do. Otherwise no issues with the shoes – other than being impressed with how well they performed on a pretty tough initial run.

Oh yeah, the shoes were Nike Zoom Fly SP in size 8.5.

They do feel very different from my Zoom Fly v1, which to me feel more like a light-weight daily trainer style of running shoe. The SPs feel much more like a go faster shoe.

Now to get a bunch more miles and hopefully a race in them to see how they really do.

A good first run in the Zoom Fly SPs and an excellent quarter-mile speed workout.