8 x 1000m

The marathon training plan says 8 x 1000m at 80% max HR. I've never really tried to work out what this session is all about and I've mostly tried to run this as close to max HR as possible. Today, I was taking a morning off skiing to find a flattish stretch of road and run these intervals at 3:45 pace instead. My reasoning behind this was that with the altitude and the cold, I'd have to compensate in terms of pace.

I programmed the Garmin for the intervals and set off up to Megevette along the main road for my warm-up. I was still tired from last night's recovery run and I hadn't been looking forward to this morning's session anyway. My worst fears were confirmed from the start: this was going to be tough.

I left Megevette on the main road and thought that I'd better start here. The road beyond this village is a long straight section over 1 kilometre long and after a fairly flat start it then rises gently before heading up to a col some 4 kilometres after this. I set off and tried to push the pace, imagining that I was on the track at St Germain and chasing Nico, leading Fred and Thierry and in shape. Unfortunately, this didn't translate into any performance today on the road and my legs started to tire after a couple of hundred metres. I looked at the Garmin and saw 580 metres .Great, I've only got 400m to go, just a lap of the track. I looked again at the Garmin a minute later and saw 190m. Marvellous, it works as a countdown and I still hadn't finished my first interval. I finished the first and looked forward to the slight downhill back. The idea was to run this up and down 3 times and then continue for the final two intervals back down the road towards Onnion and benefit from the downhill. It was a real relief to complete that third uphill interval and for me, the sesssion was virtually over from that point on.

The intervals went as follows:

3:54, 3:40, 3:55, 3:37, 3:52, 3:40, 3:44, 3:34

You can spot the uphills easily in the times above. The temperature was a good -10°C and I was a real sight with frozen snot around my nose and mouth by the time I got back, completely shattered.

16.2 km all up in 1:14 or an average pace of 4:36 / km. This was a tough one.