W15KW#1 - Intervals

Gah - I hate running tracks. Not because the sessions are tough (which they are!), but because I can never figure out where to start running from! Sure there's markings everywhere, but what the hell do they all mean? After my disaster last week, I found out that there's usually little plaques along the inside of the track with the different distances marked beside the lines - and sure enough there are on my local track.

Problem solved you think - well maybe not! It turns out a lot of distances (basically anything over 400m), even if they've a staggered start, basically all come to the inside lane at some point. So while I easily found the 800m staggered start line, doing two laps of the outside lane still had me "going long". I gave up on the outside lane after the second attempt and ran along the inside for my other two attempts this evening - apparently not the done thing for training as it wears the track out!

I came across an interesting race from the 2004 olympics on youtube earlier (when trying to find out how to run the distance properly on the track). Check out where the guy came to win it from in the last 200m - unreal!

Anyways, tonights session consisted of the following

• 10 minute warmup
• 10 minutes walking around the track trying to figure out where to start!
• 4 x 800m at 4m 10s pace
• 10 minute warmdown

Aside from being long in my first two runs, I got through the session ok. Times were not too consistant (based on average pace), which they're supposed to be, but I'll work on that over the next few sessions. Warmdown was tough enough - bit of walking needed there.