Tuesday Intervals

Leave it to me to schedule two speed workouts back to back! With my busy schedule it's not always obvious to fit all the workouts in but this time I think I did a good job. With the weird weather we had in Ottawa, I didn't quite know how to dress. I had to dig into my winter clothes to make up for the up to 30km/h wind gusts, making the balmy 2 celsius feels more like -5. Fortunately for me, the wet snow that had been falling in the early morning had stopped long enough for the sidewalks to dry up a little bit by lunch time. I borrowed this interval workout from Marlene last time and I liked it enough that I wanted a second crack at it. 1km warmup followed by 4 sets of 2x1km at interval speed with 500m cooldowns.
First set at 4:20 and 5:43. total failure against the wind and going uphill (do I sound like I am exaggerating? I might be a bit!). Second set at 4:22 and 4:47 (much better!), third set at 4:56 and 4:45 (is it over yet?) and last set at 5:04 and 4:30 (finally I'm done!). Not quite as consistent as I'd like but a good showing overall considering the wind gusts and the fact that I ran a track workout the night before! A total of 12km completed in 2 seconds short of 1 hour so I can call it at 4:59m/km, yeah!

You probably already know that I use RunSaturday a lot for all kinds of analysis and mapping. One of the things you may not know about RunSaturday is that it allows you to quickly see how you are doing on a dashboard type page when you log in. I love seeing how far I've trained in the last 30 days and this week I noticed I am above 300km for the last 30 days. Woot woot!
If you are the least bit serious about tracking your training, I recommend you check www.RunSaturday.com out. It supports a whole range of fitness devices and best of all it's free and open. Even if you don't have a device or train indoors, you can still enter all your relevant information manually for running, biking and swimming. I just love it!

If you have a bit of time today, check our RoadBunner's awesome picture review of Big Sur. That's one race I wouldn't mind doing some day!

In the mix was Children of Paradise's Urban Alien.