Adjusting My Speed

When I created my marathon training plan a little over a month ago, I was pretty conservative when it came to speed workouts.

Even though I had a specific time goal in mind at the beginning of the year, I have since adjusted that goal due to the fact that I have not seen as much improvement as I thought I would over the summer. My current goal for the Philadelphia Marathon is just to get through it. As I get closer to race day I will re-evaluate my fitness and training and then possibly set a time goal.

I have recently seen some improvement. I finally got in tune with my body and I am training properly and feeling good. I am not running too much and not skipping runs. I have put in some quality miles that feel good. Even though my improvement has not been off the charts, the improvement is there and I am feeling better about my running.

So now I look at my training program and feel as though my speed workouts are too easy. I have decided to be a little more aggressive and get some hard workouts in there. I am still a little nervous about going too hard. I will be approaching these workouts with enough caution so that I do not injure myself, but smart enough to know when I can go harder.

I have done a few speed workouts over the last month and a half. I have done some fartleks, an easy run with some sprints mixed in. I have done 5x800 which I plan to build up to 10x800 in order to measure my fitness and possibly predict my marathon pace. Finally, I turned an easy day into 2x10:00 minutes with a target pace around 9:30. That one I could have done more than 2 intervals, but it was supposed to be an easy day and I wanted to keep it semi easy.

These workouts were not always comfortable, but they felt good. If that makes any sense. When I finished the workouts I felt like I accomplished something. Even though I was sore, it was a good sore, and I did not have any pains that worried me.

I feel like my body is becoming much more adapted to running, and now I can work toward improvement a little better than I have been.

eewww... Who Fartleked?

Sorry. I can never resist a fart(lek) joke.

So today was the first time I ever really did fartleks. I turned the auto lap off on my Garmin and split the laps after each recovery and interval. I am pretty impressed with how fast I was running and I hope that doing this every once in a while will help with my speed.

One thing I will do next time is not have so many splits... maybe just sprinkle in a few bursts of speed rather than have so many intervals. Just look at them all...


note: I tried formatting this so it would be easier to read, but it is not going right. You can check out my log over at runnersworld for the full workout if you want.

................Distance............Time.................Pace.............avg HR
Recovery.........0.64 Mi ...........6:58.96..........10:55.........154 warm up
Interval ..........103 Yd .............0:27.25............7:46........... 172
Recovery ........0.12 Mi............ 1:14.83............10:24 ..........170
Interval ...........89 Yd.............. 0:25.23............8:19............ 170
Recovery .........0.12 Mi........... 1:18.02............10:51 ..........173
Interval ...........102 Yd ............0:28.58 ............8:14........... 171
Recovery .........111 Yd .............0:41.4 ..............10:57..........171
Interval ............123 Yd ...........0:35.81 .............8:33 ...........173
Recovery ..........155 Yd ...........0:56.29 ...........10:40...........174
Interval .............134 Yd ..........0:33.42 .............7:19 ............174
Recovery .........141 Yd ...........1:07.83 ............14:07.........168 walk break
Interval .............101 Yd ............0:26.75 ............7:47............168
Recovery ...........0.13 Mi ...........1:32.97 .............11:56.........169
Interval ...............109 Yd ...........0:32.13 ............8:39 ..........169
Recovery .............125 Yd ...........0:47.52 ...........11:10 ..........170
Interval ...............103 Yd ............0:31.8 ..............9:04 ..........174
Recovery ..............143 Yd ...........0:53.98 ...........11:05 .........172
Interval ................108 Yd ...........0:31.61 ............8:36 ...........173
Recovery ..............0.33 Mi ...........3:53.26 ...........11:47 .........168

One thing I noticed is that my heart rate is pretty steady. I am not an expert but I think that can be good. I also think the workout might be better if I get my heart rate higher during the faster intervals. Perhaps I did not go hard enough?

This was fun, and I felt really good afterward. My goal is really distance and endurance over speed, but I would like to get faster than the crawl I am at right now. I am sure this will help.