Tuesday Speedwork

I'm getting fast. Not speed demon fast, mind you; I have friends who can run my mile PR and still hold a conversation. But a combo of speed work, months of hill training, cross training, and a great group of friends all work to help me get my time down.

How much? Well... I'll get to that in a minute.

Strangely enough, I took yesterday off- with rain, triathlon recovery, and a general feeling of malaise being the leading reasons why. Oh, and I think I forgot to drink coffee till afternoon.

Today I went in to work early, did the work thing, and had 2.5 hours to kill before speed work. After an hour of pouring over the tri results, I went to warm up. About Seven and a quarter miles of warm up. :) Every so often I had to tell myself to hold back; run at about 40%, relax, and enjoy the scenery. Kept me at a 9:15 average, with occasional forays into the 8 min/mile land.

Got to the track and heard todays workout: Mile sprint, quarter rest; 2 mile run (clockwise; interesting twist), 800M rest interval, then two 800s with a 400 rest between them.

Tough stuff. But I did well! My first mile was at a nice 6:09, knocking 25 seconds off my previous mile PR set at the Angela Hospice Run a week ago. If I keep up at this rate, I might see sub-6 in October. Um... yeah. wow.

The two mile pace was 6:42; not that far off my mile PR before today. The quarters were 3:14 and 3:02 respectively. The home stretch of my last half- maybe 50-100 meters, was definitely sub-5, perhaps even hitting sub-4 for a few feet.

Let me be honest: I never, every thought I'd be fast. Less than a year ago I was pretty happy running at a 10-11 min/mile pace, and would do my long runs at 12:30 and feel well satisfied. Running at 9 min/mile was fast for me, and averaging 8 min pace for anything over a half mile was something other people did.

But I'm getting faster. And ya'know- it feels kind of nice. :)
/brag