Thursday, February 2, 2012

The Groundhog Day Workout

Happy Groundhog Day!  Seriously, what's not to love about this cute, furry, little fellow - other than that America's most famous groundhog, Punxatawny Phil, saw his shadow today?
(source)
Today's workout was more reminiscent of this Groundhog Day.
(source)
Yep, it was a 400 meter repeat day. I got home from work, pulled on my cold weather gear, set my Garmin to give me 30 seconds of walking (rest) between intervals, and headed out the door. After a 1/3 mile warm up, the first 3 repeats felt good, but that may have had something to do with the fact that my route has a decidedly downhill grade for the first 1.5 miles.  On the way back, it's all uphill baby - and if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you know how much I loathe hills!  After my final repeat, I decided to push myself and run the last 3/4 of a mile home instead of taking it easy and walking.  When I uploaded the data from my Garmin, here's what I found:

Warm Up: 0.31 miles @ 9:40 pace
Interval 1:  0.25 miles @ 8:39 pace
Interval 2:  0.25 miles @ 8:30 pace
Interval 3:  0.25 miles @ 7:44 pace*
Interval 4:  0.25 miles @ 7:48 pace*
Interval 5:  0.25 miles @ 9:00 pace
Interval 6:  0.25 miles @ 8:44 pace
Cool Down: 0.16 miles @ 9:19 pace
Overall Pace (including 30 second walk breaks): 9:18/mile
* I almost fell out of my chair when I saw these!

The last 3/4 mile was also run at 9:19 pace.

Why do I care about these statistics (aside from the whole bean counter/data junkie thing)? Because my 5k PR pace is 9:18/mile and I really thought it would be a lot longer before I saw numbers like that again.  I may not be exactly where I want to be yet, but I'm definitely making progress!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love that movie lmao! Congrats on the good numbers!

Megan said...

Nice work out! Doubt I'll make those numbers! But I do what I can! I'll be 'eating your dust' so to say come Warrior Dash! LOL