Taking Victories, One Workout at a TIME!

I think that my time playing, watching and coaching football has really helped me clearly see that you cannot look ahead in order to meet your goals. In football terms, it's focusing on that BIG game 2 weeks from now, and not taking care of business the way you should with the teams your supposed to beat. I'm starting to apply that same philosophy to my speed workouts in the morning, and it has really had an impact on my performance, it a positive way.

Mamma Michele is the master creator of some of the most amazing workouts. Where she comes up with some of these workouts is beyond me. I swear....there has to be some torture book out there. Either that, or she's writing a psych book on getting grown adults to do insane things. I've compared us to Pavlov's dogs. We're out there doing the session....beep beep beep.....slow down.....beep beep beep......speed up.....and so on and so on. We're conditioned to the beep beep beep. And today there was a WHOLE lot of beeping going on.



On the schedule, 20x1 minute with decreasing rest periods (1 min, 45sec, 30sec, 15 sec). Those rotated as we went through the workout. What was funny, I had programmed my Garmin to do the workout. And, it gives you a heads up that the interval is about up....little 5 second beep warning....Threw everyone off thier routine a bit at the start.. hehehe....Like I said, we're conditioned to the beeps. you hear a beep, you either speed up or slow down.

But, those who weren't used to the Garmin got used to it...Or got used to Dave giving the verbal, 5 seconds left, warning. :) The last time I did this workout it was only 16 1 minute sets. This time, being 20, I wasn't totally turned off. I actually like the challenge of building up the number of sets. And after examining the data of Dr. Garmin, my body agreed. I had a great run! Almost all of my sets were in the 7:15 range, and I had several at 6:59. Yep.....Mark that, there's a 6 in that first digit! Hopefully that's a trend that you'll be seeing more of those as the blog goes on. That's the goal: Hammer the hard workouts, and cruise the tweeners all the while building up the miles and doing more with less. That's the important part. The repetition of running for a predetermined amount of time, but because your getting faster, you're mileage increases.

So today, I managed to get in exactly 4 miles during this workout! With the 1.75 miles of warm up and cool down, I got in 5.75 miles. I've set my goal this week at 35 miles. And after 2 days, I'm almost a third of the way there with just over 11 in the books. So now, with Today's in the book, I can officially look forward to tomorrows workout. It's a 5.7 mile meeting with Paul.

Until then, Train Hard and LIVESTRONG!