26 August 2010

Early morning intervals

Autumn is arriving fast and it's getting darker and darker at 6:15. What's worse is that with the end of Summer and the return of the Parisiens from holiday, I'll have to get up 15 minutes earlier in order to still make it into work on time.

The big test was today with a 6x1000m interval session programmed in the training schedule. I wasn't looking forward to this as I knew it would be hard work and Fabrice had put some pressure on me by telling me that he did this session last week with an average time of 3:35 per interval.

I warmed up for a kilometre and then began the intervals. First one went alright and I knew that I'd been making an effort. Garmin won't show you your speed over the interval once it's finished so I didn't know exactly how fast I ran. 300m recovery and I was off again. I pushed hard and could feel the tiredness in my legs by the end of the interval. I then repeated this for the remainder of the session. All went fairly well despite the uphill sections in places until the last interval and I lost the motivation to run this hard. I was disappointed with myself, but at the same time knew that I'd given my best effort in completing the session.

Intervals went as follows:

3:46, 3:38, 3:51, 3:45, 3:46, 3:54

11.7km in total in 54:26 so an average of 4:39/km. Too bad on that last interval though.

3 comments:

Nicolas said...

Big session, very hard to manage it in the early morning since you're not completly awoken, with no breakfast in the belly! Sure you'd have done better at an evening session time.

Lorenza said...

Good job you're having a "lie-in" tomorrow, that's all I can say! :)

James said...

I'm not too upset with the session having looked at what I managed earlier this year in February:
http://frenchrunning.blogspot.com/2010/02/week-6.html
when I was running at 3:34 - 3:45 pace. I agree that the early morning start makes it a little harder as well as running by myself. Some company would have helped in motivating me to put that little extra bit of effort in.