Thursday VMA

I arrived a bit late for the session tonight and interupted the president in his speech to the runners prior to warm-up. Laurence told me afterwards that I received comments as to how elegant I was, which is always good for the ego.

The ego took a bit of a battering afterwards when having got changed and chased the others down over the warm-up, we finally arrived back at the track. The marathon session for tonight was 10x500m as a VMA (VO2 max) interval session. In the absence of our trainer, Miguel, it was Thierry who was calling the shots and he declared that it was a threshold session instead.

I decided that there was no way that, having prepared myself mentally for VO2 intervals, I would be doing threshold pace instead. I decided to run the 500m with José and Thierry. Luckily for me, Thierry was running 20 x 500m and I only had half to do. I set off with José and we ran ahead of Thierry for the full session. José did a couple more with Thierry after the 10 and then dropped out.

The intervals went as follows:

1:46, 1:49, 1:46, 1:46, 1:45, 1:44, 1:43, 1:43, 1:43, 1:42

I was pleased with the increase in speed as we went through them. On the last 4, I was by myself as José pushed the pace to under 1:40 and I couldn't follow. I checked in the training plan to see what speed was expected over 500m and for the 3 hour marathon it stated 1:45 intervals so I was well under this by the end. Felt good but tired on the last 3.

Good session.