Tuesday - 30/30 speedwork

Ran 3 miles of 30 second hard/30 second medium with Sean, Luis and Bill. I put in an easy 4 mile warmup - 1 mile to the park near the tennis center where I met up with Bill and Sean and then we did a 3 mile loop warmup together. It was probably about 80 degrees and very humid out. Luis had warmed up separately and met us when we finished our warmup. I did drills and strides and stretched out and was feeling pretty good. Sean told me I should try to aim for running about 5:10 pace on the hard 30 seconds (about 5k race pace) and then 5:50 pace on the medium (about tempo run pace). Sean gave me a 30 second head start over Bill and then I'm not sure how much of a head start Sean and Luis gave Bill. That way we would all be finishing fairly close to each other. I set my Garmin to beep every 30 seconds, but I forgot to change the autolap to change every 30 seconds so I only have my average mile splits and not the avg pace for each hard/medium effort.

I started off and probably ran a little too hard the first 30 seconds because I really didn't want Bill to catch me before two miles. I looked at my Garmin, but the pace was always changing since there is a little bit of a lag on it so it was hard to tell how quick I was going. When I slowed down, it gradually came down so I would look at it midway through and try to estimate how quick I was going, but it was kind of tough. It seemed like at the end of the hard 30 seconds it was still getting quicker and it was still getting slower at the end of the medium 30 seconds. After a couple, I felt I had a reasonable handle on what the paces should feel like and just went by effort and glanced at my Garmin once to make sure I was somewhere in the right ball park. I hit mile 1 in about 5:23. The first mile was a little quick because I had a lot of adrenaline going and I started and ended on a fast 3o second interval. The second mile was definitely tougher and it had the small hill in the middle of memorial drive on it, but I seemed to be staying pretty consistent on my hard/medium paces. I would typically get down to about 5:10 on my garmin by the end of the hard part and be up in the 5:50's at the end of the medium. My mile 2 was 5:39 but nobody had caught me yet. I figured if Bill caught me, I was just going to stay with him as long as possible and try to hang until the end.

At about 2-1/4 miles I heard footsteps coming up behind me on one of my medium efforts and I figured that it was probably Bill catching me. My watched beeped and I started my hard effort and I could still hear the footsteps right behind me and I was trying really hard not to get passed. At the end of my 30 seconds hard I eased up a bit and Sean goes blowing by me. I guess my hard pace was his medium/recovery effort. Near 2-1/2 miles Luis catches me and goes by right at the end of a medium and I start my hard and stay with him for 30 seconds. I think he ran the first two miles of 30/30 at Sean's pace and then just cruised in the last mile. He went by and I knew that I didn't have too much further to go which was good because it was getting tough. I got close to 2-3/4 miles and started a hard interval and I knew that I only had a hard/medium/hard left to go. Since Bill hadn't caught me I felt like maybe I would be able to hold him off or at least hang with him if he caught me. I started my last hard effort and I was still ahead of him as I was getting close to the port-o-potties and all of a sudden he just blew by me. I probably had about 20 seconds to go when he caught me and I think he ended up beating me by about 5 seconds over that last little bit. I finished in 16:35 which worked out to about a 5:33 3rd mile. I think I was able to keep my 5:10/5:50 pace for most of the workout which would get me to 3 miles in 16:30 so I thought it was a pretty successful workout. Sean told me my form was horrible at the end and I needed to work on improving it. I asked him what to do to improve my form and he told me to do more hard workouts like this where I have to run fast when I'm tired, but don't worry as much about my time at the end as keeping good form. Afterwards I did a 1 mile easy cooldown and some stretching.