Intervals at the Gym

In yesterday’s post, I noted that I did some speedwork last week at the gym. On Friday, I hit the 6-laps-to-a-mile track at the Midtown YWCA:

Old photo from last year’s post.

That raised track has 3 lanes as you see in that photo, and the inside lane is for walking. Running in lane 2 is 266 meters/lap, which is 1596 meters over 6 laps, or just 13 meters shy of a mile. Running in lane 3 (the “passing lane” where I do most of my running) is 271 meters/lap, which is 1626 meters over 6 laps, or 17 meters longer than a mile. So I’ve always called 6 laps a mile.

I ran hard efforts of 2, 4, 6, 4, and 2 laps, with 1 easy lap of running between the efforts. So that was a total of 3 miles of hard running, with the longest effort being 1 mile (6 laps).

I ended up running my 1 mile effort at 6:00, and the rest were just faster than that (6:00 pace was my goal for these intervals):

1:56
1:14 jogging
2:00, 1:56 = 3:56
1:14 jogging
2:04, 2:00, 1:55 = 6:00
1:19 jogging
2:01, 1:53 = 3:55
1:21 jogging
1:57

Every interval had a negative split. That doesn’t mean I’m in great shape right now - it just means I went out a little conservatively being I hadn’t done any track work in about a year. I was scared.

Total, it was 3 miles of hard running in 17:44, and 2/3 of a mile of easy running in 5:08. (I ran a warm-up and a cool-down for a total of 7 miles on the day.) Both of those times are in the middle of the 2 times I did this workout last year (when I first did 18:05 and 5:29 last November, and then 17:27 and 4:59 a month later in December). I wasn’t trying to KILL it last week; I was sort of doing a “re-introduction” to speedwork where I just wanted to try some fast running. If I do this workout again in a month or 2, THEN I’ll really try to kill it and knock my times down a lot.