I thought, maybe, if I put some strange and interesting stats in the window, I could attract readers. Why don't I go to the basement and get those strange and interesting stats I've been working on?
Ahem, sorry. :) But I really do have some strange and interesting stats from my run today! First, the story...
Da-doo. (MP3 link removed 5/2...it was a song from this musical, if you didn't figure that out already.)
I ran at about 12:45, because I had a meeting at 2:00. The weather was what you might expect for 12:45 pm on a late-April Houston afternoon--80 degrees, humid enough that my weather gnome was telling me that it felt like 83. Mercifully cloudy, though. I decided to hell with my "no running in over 80 degrees" thing, because I'll be treadmill-bound till October if I stick to that. I got dressed, hooked up the iPod, and hit the track.
You'd think after the Chip0tle incident earlier in the week, I would have thought to wait more than an hour after eating before doing so. But of course, I have the memory of a particularly stupid goldfish when it comes to these things, so it only occurred to me as my HR was hitting the 130s on the warmup lap. Shit...this was going to be a loooong workout.
Somewhere in the middle of the first running lap, I grasped the full extent to which this was going to suck. My legs felt like lead, my stomach was lurching, and my HR was in the 170s at a 1/4 mile. I decided that I would try next week's 5:1 intervals a little bit early, just to see if that would keep me from passing out and/or throwing up by the time I hit the 2-mile mark. Since I had already run more than 5 minutes, I wasn't sure whether I should just walk immediately, or wait until I got all the way around. I toyed with the idea of keeping the 5:1 ratio (10-minute walk, 2-minute run), but rejected it on the grounds that I would feel like a total candyass if I dialed it back that far. In the end, I opted for 10:1 intervals instead.
So anyway, I did the run in 10-minute segments with 1-minute walks between them. My HR wasn't really much better, but I stopped feeling sick, anyway.
Now, here comes the strange and interesting part--I finished faster with the walk intervals. Check it:
Workout time: 44:30
Run time: 27:52
Avg speed: 4.3 mph
WTF? I KNOW that I did 4 running laps--I counted, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't delirious or anything. I didn't feel like I was going any faster today than Wednesday, and I walked a full two minutes of it besides! How could I possibly have been going that much faster? Bizarre.
Bizarre in a good way, though. I was afraid my speed was going to suffer quite a bit going back to intervals, but it seems (at least from this test) that I actually run faster if I don't think I'm going to run as long. I'm going to try it again on Monday and see what my times are like then. It's entirely possible that this is a fluke.
Posted by Joy at April 29, 2005 01:51 PM