Monday - 30/30 for 3.25 miles

I needed to be in earlier at work so I wasn't able to go to the Monday morning workout so I got to workout in the heat of the day at lunch. What a difference a day off and enough sleep and a massage over the weekend make. I think I slept a little over 9 hours on Friday night and about 8.5 hours Saturday night and I also took an hour long nap Sunday afternoon. I didn't want to do hills on the treadmill so I went back to the old 30 seconds hard/30 seconds medium workout. There is a 3.25 mile loop with markers every 1/4 mile near the office that I often run on with water fountains. I think the loop was about 65% shade from trees and 35% in the blazing sun. I did a 2.25 mile warmup and spent a little extra time stretching and did a couple of strides before I started the workout. It was 88 and the heat index was 96 so I knew that I wasn't going to be breaking any speed records, but I wanted to have a solid workout. My goal was to run it somewhere around 5:45 pace and I was determined to finish the workout even if I had a really slow last mile - I wasn't going to throw in the towel early.

I started out relatively easy and I didn't want to get too crazy the first mile and hit it in about 5:56. I thought I had been going a little quicker, but I guess I was easing up a little too much on the easy parts. I picked up the pace on the 2nd mile and made sure that I kept cruising at a fast but relaxed pace on the 30 seconds medium effort and hit mile 2 in 5:40. I knew mile 3 would be tough and the last 1/2 of it was pretty painful and I didn't feel like I was getting to recover at all on the medium effort, but I hit mile 3 in 5:38. I was tempted to stop at 3 miles, but the whole loop is 3.25 so I kept going and ran the last 1/4 in 1:23. It was tough in those conditions, but my legs felt really great and I was much more relaxed on this run than I have been lately. I did a slow 2.25 mile cooldown back to the office for a total of 7.75 miles followed by stretching.