Wintervals

Ah, Winterval, that eternal bête noire of the tabloid press, despite never having really existed, or at least not in the way they pretended it did. I have decided to reclaim the word and apply it instead to "intervals which take place when it is cold". Which today was.

We headed off to the outdoor track at Aberdeen Sports Village, which we had very much to ourselves apart from a couple of guys who were there at the very beginning and another one who came later and did a few terrifyingly fast 200m intervals. Oh, and a load of schoolchildren who all trooped through on their way to something else. But basically the track was ours. Felt very important and professional-affleet like, having a massive track all to ourselves, except when the fast guy was running about three times faster than we were.

I'd vaguely planned to run some 400m intervals at my goal 10k pace, which is currently about 8:45/mile as my goal for the year is to get under 55 minutes, but when we got there this seemed a bit unambitious particularly as we have another mile race coming up in Feb so after the first couple of laps I decided to aim for around 7-7:15 pace.

After a couple of laps warm up, I managed 8 x 400m intervals all in well under 2 minutes, as follows:


Time Pace
1 01:54 07:47
2 01:54 07:52
3 01:47 07:14
4 01:43 06:56
5 01:49 07:17
6 01:43 07:03
7 01:46 07:08
8 01:43 06:56

Now if only I could run at that pace for longer than 400 metres...

Had plenty of recovery time for the first 4 as we were chatting in between, but tried to do the second 4 a bit quicker with much less recovery time. Pace felt manageably hard, not flat out but pushing myself a bit. I really enjoyed it and am going to make more use of the track from now on, I think - v reasonably priced for off peak hours at £1.90 per person for an unlimited time.

Total miles today including warm-up: 2.54
Total Janathon miles so far: 114.3