Day 290 - stretching

Type - Interval training

1 mile jog, 0.5 mile fast, 200 metre recovery x 8, 1 mile jog

Distance - 7 miles

Time - 52 minutes and 24 seconds

Finally back to the gym this evening after an illness and busyness gap that has seen me away from Clissold Leisure Centre for too long. I did a fifteen minute session on the cross trainer for a warmup and then onto the treadmill.

In some respects this evening's training should have been as difficult as the one I had done a few weeks before. It covered the same total distance (7 miles), had the same distance of fast sections, and the same number of recovery periods. But for some reason 8 half mile bursts, with just 200 metres of recovery was much tougher. Maybe it was just mentally - turning the treadmill up from the 9.5 km/h recovery to 14 km/h for the fifth, sixth, seventh and eigth was increasingly difficult.

But by the seventh I knew I was going to be able to do the distance and the time, and so ran the last quarter mile at a faster speed. Up through 15 km/h to 16 km/h. And faster. Faster still to finish up at 17.5 km/h on the seventh interval. To be beaten by even faster on the eigth, when I got the treadmill up to a floor shaking, leg thundering 20 km/h for the two minutes. It wasn't impossible to keep up, but it did make me slightly concerned that I would slip or trip and go smacking face first onto the spinning black belt.

But I didn't. And finished. In a time that was a couple of minutes faster than the previous interval. And considering this involved twice as much speeding up and slowing down it shows that the average speed in the fast sections was a decent notch on last time (averaging at about 14.5 km/h).