Fartlek Pace Run

I tried to talk myself out of running today. I was a little fatigued after the weekend runs, and I'm dreading tomorrow's Wilke mountain repeats. So, I didn't run early today in the early mist and rain, and waited. After lunch and various stuff, the weather was clear, and not too hot, maybe in the low 70's, so I figured I had no excuse. I put on the gear, including my newly repaired HR monitor watch, and headed out the door about 5:00 pm.

The workout was scheduled for 20 minute warmup and cooldown, with Fartlek accelerations in the middle, to simulate the varying paces and stresses of a long run or race. I didn't have time for the full length workout, so I just cut the warmup and cooldown periods down (to 10 minutes and somewhere around 6 minutes, respectively), and kept all the guts of the workout, which was 3 x 5 minutes acceleration with 2:00 minute recovery jogging between, and 6 x 3:00 minutes accelerations with 1:00 minute recovery between.

I did this all in the neighborhood, which has rolling hills, but nothing terribly bad. I was surprised initially to see that my HR numbers were very good. I haven't had the HR watch in a while, and haven't used it for training in a while, but I remember having trouble staying in the warmup range before. Tonight, it was no big deal to cruise along at 9:20 pace with my HR running at under 150 bpm. That was really cool to see. Once the accelerations begain, I actually had trouble getting the HR up to my former "floor" of 160 for the Tempo portions, and again, that was really cool to see. My pace for the actual acceleration bits was somewhere right at 8:00 pace. I had a nice time on this workout, cruising along, shifting gears as it were, and enjoying the ride. When I got to the cooldown segment at the end, my HR quickly dropped back to the 150 range, which was very different from months ago when I was doing similar workouts. HR at the finish was 152, and it quickly dropped down to 140 within a minute of stopping.

Of course, I messed up with the data on the HR watch, and lost the individual high/low/average numbers for all the different segments. But, I was scouting that stuff out as I was running tonight, so I've got a good handle on what my numbers were. That's the only problem with this particular watch...it only holds all the tiny detailed numbers for the last workout, and if you accidentally hit the "go" button again before you download all the stuff in it, you are left with only the average HR and high HR for the workout. Oh, well.

Overall workout about 7 miles, overall pace 8:33/mile, pace during Fartlek segments, including recovery jogging, was 8:15/mile. I was probably running too hard for the purpose of this workout, so I'll try to modify things next time out. Still, it was fun to see, judging from the HR information, that I'm in much better cardiovascular shape now than I was a year ago, or even 6 months ago.