February 2

Another week down and the actual half marathon plan has started. The basic outline will be Tuesday, Thursday drill runs, Saturday intermediate run, and a Sunday long run until the end of March. I want to make at least one spin class and one day of long swimming each week as well as leave open space for one additional spin or swim each week. I also picked up my new toy, the Polar RS800 watch, so I now have a new heart rate monitor. It also has GPS for plotting distances and some sweet software that plots your pace, heart rate, and distance over your workout. You can graph these results over time so it will be interesting to see how my efficiency improves over time this year.
To last week’s efforts. Last Tuesday I covered 4 miles on the treadmill with 5 one minute intervals after the 20 minute point. I felt good during the entire workout. I followed that with a 45 minute spin class on Wednesday, then another run Thursday. That was a GP run (gentle pickups). I did 4 miles at easy pace then you run 5GP’s where you first get your heart rate to recovery (139 or below for me) and then run 100 yards while increasing your pace then holding the max pace for another 20 yards. Five of those brought my total run distance to 5 miles even. I was struggling a bit on the regular part of the run, but really enjoyed the GP stage. I did nothing Friday or Saturday, as I had kid duty with my wife out of town all weekend, but when she returned Sunday I got out and did a 7 mile endurance run. I covered the 7 miles right at 1h10min, so kept a steady pace and felt like I could go farther. That is the longest run distance I have done in quite some time so I was pleased.
I am very curious to see how much my running improves following a training plan that has interval work in addition to just logging miles. I think I have always been a slow runner because all I have ever done is log miles, no speed work before. If I can get down closer to a 9 mile/min pace by the half marathon that will be a great sign of improvement and my worst triathlon discipline, running, will be set for the year. That is the hope right now.