Having just completed a long tempo run on Saturday, I wondered if John would delay my normal weekly tempo interval run from Monday until later in week. Well last night I got my answer…
- 30 minutes – easy pace
- 10 x 2-min at 6:20 to 6:30 pace
1-min active recovery between each repeat - 30 minutes – easy pace
Last week we did a series of 5-minute repeats at 6:50 pace, but today things were shorter and much faster. I was a little nervous about how my legs would feel after Saturday’s effort, but looked forward to running fast.
Obviously having a Garmin is critical for these types of workouts, however when I was getting ready to leave the house this morning to meet Nathan, I realized I had not charged my Garmin 405 after Saturday’s run. I turned it on to check the battery and it immediately gave me the “Battery Low” message. I ran upstairs quickly and grabbed my old 305 that was sitting on the charger, hoping it would get me through just for today.
Nathan and I met at the Edwin Warner Park Nature Center, and as usual ran our 30 minute warmup through the park and on the Harpeth River Greenway. The temperatures were in the upper 70s, but unlike last week we were greeted with full sun. Just last week Nathan commented that if the humidity stayed really high, it would be especially nasty when the sun returned. Well, today was pretty nasty!
Even with that, my legs felt really, really good from the outset. We slowly increased our pace from 9:12 to 8:03 through the first 30 minutes before starting the intervals on the Harpeth River Greenway. Just before we reached the greenway, I looked down at my Garmin 305, and the screen was blank! The battery only lasted 28 minutes! Awesome.
Well, for the remainder of the workout I was dependent on Nathan to be my pacer and timekeeper, and he did a fantastic job. I was a little annoyed that I couldn’t track my heart rate, but was grateful to have Nathan taking care of everything else. For all but two of the intervals the biggest thing I had to fight was going too fast. My legs continued to feel great.
We ran all 10 intervals and recoveries on the greenway and onto the streets of Bellevue, completing five on the way out, and five on the way back. The fourth and fifth repeats were completed on a slight incline, which was a bit of an increased challenge over the other eight. However, this led to numbers six and seven feeling fairly slow on the way back down.
According to Nathan’s Garmin, all of the repeats were completed at a pace between 6:20 and 6:26, which was right in line with our target range. We closed out the morning with an additional 30 minutes through the park and on the greenway back to the Nature Center.
All-in-all, Nathan looked great today and I felt pretty fantastic considering the hard effort on Saturday and the nasty weather this morning. In total we finished just over 11.25-miles with an average pace of 8:10 per mile with warmup and cool down.
Beast Mode…ON!