Track Tuesday 3

 Week 3 of 8 at the track.

Despite a good hard effort on Friday, 5 miles at 7:29 pace on Saturday, and a 16 mile slog in the heat at 8:15 pace on Sunday I actually felt pretty good today.  I had taken yesterday fairly easy with just 4 miles in the morning and mostly just a day of relaxing and recovery.

Temperature this morning was 70 degrees and humid but at least the sun was out instead of running through fog.  Today was going to be a hard workout so I went with the pink vaporflys.  Weather felt okay on the warmup as I ran a 7:22 and 7:06 for the first 2 miles before easing back to 7:22 pace for an additional .61 mile as I got to the track and wrapped up the warm up.  

I took the earbuds out and took my shirt off... it was time to get serious!  I made my way to the far end of the track, to the 200m start, hit my lap button, and took off.  

I focused pretty strongly on running by feel, making a point not to even check splits on the first interval...  The first one is always easy and I wound up running it a bit too fast (as usual).  One of these days I'll run the first one too slow and see how it effects the workout...  After the first one, I settled in and started hitting my splits.  After the 3rd one I was getting pretty fatigued and considered making the 4th my last.  The 4th interval was tough but I got through it and talked myself into running at least 600 more meters (knowing that I could push 600 to 800 and 800 to 1000 unless I completely blew up).  The last 1000 was rough but when I got to the 800m point I was able to dig deep and finish fast skimming a few seconds off the last interval in the process.  

Overall, I was very happy with the workout, especially coming off a pretty tough 16 miler on Sunday.  I made it through the whole workout as planned (after questioning if I should cut it short mid workout), got the HR up to 177 by the end, barely walked on the recoveries, in fact I nailed the recoveries compared to last week.  Partly I think I'm getting more acclimated to the weather but I should also be getting more fit (hopefully)... I'll get my true test in about 5 weeks.