Monday, December 19, 2011

Training 12/18/11 Hill sprints & afternoon hike

Sleep: 8pm-5:30am
Sugar: 1 small glass of eggnog

Training @ 10am fasted except for coffee w/cream

2 mile run with 4 x 20s surges at the top of 10, 12, 14 & 16 minutes

6x 30-45s hill sprints @ 80-90% grinder effort. 3-4 min walk/jog down recovery.

followed by: 2 mile run with 4 x 20s surges again at top of 10, 12, 14 & 16 minutes.

Experience: It's funny being that less than a decade ago I was running 50-70 mpw and today when I saw that I had 2 miles before and after I thought, "man, that's a lot of running."  Thankfully I can still run a couple miles before and after without much mental or physical effort.  It's more the mental effort that I have to get over, but once I'm past the 5 minute mark I'm good to go.  I actually found myself wanting to go longer especially on the second 2 miles.
I ran my driveway for the hill sprints.  It's a nicely paved steep incline.  I'm not good with estimates of degrees of this particular incline so I will not attempt to guess.  None of it would be considered a "gradual" uphill though I can tell you that much and the top (or the end of these intervals as I could keep running up for a few more minutes if I wanted to run into the neighbor's drive) was the steepest most miserable part.
30-45s is quite a large range when you think about it.  The Type-A in me decided to do my first one for 40s and work to replicate that distance within the 45s window over the next 5.  I was close, but not totally successful.  I made it within about 5-10m for the majority.
By the 3rd one I was checking my clock just before 30s in and that made the last 15s seem like an eternity.  So on the 4th one I started counting strides.  This tends to be a habit of mine when I run as I like to see where my cadence is over various terrains.  I know that I average 170-180 on gradual uphills and 180-190 on flatter or downhill areas so I told myself that I couldn't check the clock until 115 steps into the 4th interval.  This got me to right around 35-40s and helped me mentally get through the last few.
Recovery: I went with 3:30 recovery for the first 4.  And the full 4 minutes for the last.  The first interval was the only one in which I was getting down with much time to spare and jogged around for about 20s or so.  The others I was mostly walking slowly (sometimes backwards) down the hill and would get to the bottom just as it was time to roll back up.  On the last one my legs were still shaking when it was time to go again.

2:30pm: Hiked 83 minutes with Corey and dogs on Mountain to Seas Trail along the Parkway. Generally felt good, but quite hungry along the way.  Had camelpak and made sure to hydrate throughout. Will bring snacks next time!

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