Interval Running

I started doing interval running in 2009, during a hot half-marathon that I wasn’t feeling from the beginning. I had read a book on Jeff Galloway’s method of running, and had a hard time convincing myself that I would be any faster if I took scheduled walk breaks – it just didn’t make sense to me. For those of you who are unfamiliar, interval running is when you run for so long (usually by minutes) with a pre-determined scheduled walk break in between; this is done over and over again during the entire course of the training run or race. The hardest part of this is making yourself walk early on, when you’re still feeling good enough that you don’t necessarily need a walk break.

I typically go into my runs with an idea of doing either 4:1 or 3:1 and adjust it according to how I feel. Often, I will start off with a longer run, and then change it to something shorter when I become fatigued – this typically won’t happen in a 5k or 10k, but anything longer and I am almost certainly running less than what I started with.

I set out on Wednesday’s run with a plan to do a 2:1 interval. It was just at 90 degrees, and even though I set out at 5:30 p.m. the sun was still beating down, making it difficult to want to attempt a longer interval. The running portion of my intervals tend to be anywhere from a 9 to a 9:30 pace; it’s just the speed my body wants to go. For a 2-hour jaunt, however, I had to check the Garmin periodically to make sure I wasn’t pushing it too hard as I wanted to make sure I could get back home after my initial five miles.

At my turn around point I took note that it had taken me one hour to achieve 5.2 miles. This is significant, as I wanted to see how much distance I could cover on the way home in the same amount of time if I changed my intervals to 1:1. The 2:1 were already become more difficult the longer I ran, and I was trying to conserve water before I could make it another 1.5 miles or so back to a Heine Bros I would be passing on my way back home. I was running at just under a 12 minute-per-mile pace with my walking breaks, so I felt pretty confident that I would be able to get right around the same mileage.

The run was supposed to only be a 4-miler, however, I was feeling good and decided to get my 2-hour run scheduled for later in the week out of the way. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself throughout all of my years of training for tri’s and long-distance racing, it’s that I should take the opportunity to complete a longer training day when I’m feeling energetic and in a good head space. Not knowing how I’d feel or what the weather would look like in two days (my regularly scheduled long run day), I knew I’d be kicking myself if I completed a mere 4 miles and then felt unmotivated or overly tired on Friday. By the time I got done with the run, I was happy that I had completed it and gotten it out of the way – this meant that now matter how I felt in a few days, I could at least muster a 4 miler, even if I had to walk it, and not have it hamper my training.

Coming up on the last few miles, I knew I was going to be close to the 5-mile mark for the second half, for a total of 10. It still baffles me that I can run just as much mileage in the same amount of time while cutting back on the amount of minutes I run. But… this is the method I used for Tri Louisville and it seemed to work well for me, so I suppose this will be my same plan for Ohio. I can’t remember what exactly my plan was going into Muncie in 2015, but I walked most of it. I’m determined not to do the same thing this time around, and hopefully have a better finish.

Today, I have a 1:40/:20 brick planned, with a 3-hour bike tomorrow morning. My longest swim will take place on Sunday at 2,550 yards. Like I told Ericka yesterday, with both of us feeling and finishing so well at Tri Louisville, the goal at this point is to keep up the training plan, which will results in (hopefully) the same result in Ohio.