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.

Speed Work

Today I had a day off work. So the plan was to get up early and go to the track for some speed work. Besides some speed play here and there, I have never really done organized speed work. So today was the day.

When the alarm went off, I was cold and tired and achy. So I turned the alarm off and went back to sleep. My kids woke me up about an hour and a half later and after a little moving around I knew that I needed to get out and run as soon as possible or else it would not happen at all.

I have been wanting to find my mile time, so the plan was to do a time trial and find that. Then I wanted to do three or four Yasso 800's just to see where my fitness is and have something to measure improvement as I get closer to the marathon.

I did not feel like driving to the track so I ran in the neighborhood. I still planned to do the mile but instead of 800's I would do three half mile intervals.

I warmed up as I was making my way to a good street to run on. I got to the corner and I was off. I ran hard and made an effort not to look at my Garmin at all. I just focused on the run and tried to keep my form good. It seemed to take a long time to finish this mile. When my watch finally beeped I was all too happy to slow down.

My mile time was 8:12.

Not incredibly fast, but I remember the very first time I tried to "run" a mile it took me about fifteen minutes and I could not even run the whole thing. In fact I think I walked more than half of it at the time.

So time for intervals. I decided to change it up and do four quarter mile intervals with quarter mile recoveries. I realized after the fact that I would do better with shorter recoveries, but live and learn.

Here are the interval times for those:

2:16
2:10
2:15
2:08

For some reason, I think I could have done them a little harder. I do not want to push myself into an injury, so I do not plan on doing speed work every week until I actually start my marathon training program.

But I do enjoy speed work... at least I do as of right now. That will probably change when I am pushing myself even more. I did a total of four miles this morning and mentally is was so much easier than running four miles at an easy pace because it was mixed up so much.

It feels good!