Toughest Speed Work Session Yet...

I was supposed to do 9 x 1 mile repeats tonight. I did 7. And the last two were at well below speedwork pace. So that frames how the night went.

My goal was 9 repeats at a 7 minute pace. But the weather was crappy -- heavy winds and a bit of rain coming from the south. And yesterday, I ran 16 miles, rode a horse for an hour and played hockey in the evening. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't put the run off until tomorrow because I've got a jam-packed day before we head off for a mini-vacation. Here are my splits:

6:57
7:00
6:50
7:00
6:57
7:19
7:19

After my first 7:19 mile, I was just about ready to walk home. My calves, hamstrings and quads were already quite sore. But I started running the 7th repeat away from home and the first 2/10's of a mile actually felt pretty good. But then the soreness returned quite rapidly, so I turned around and continued running towards home. The last half mile I actually had a fairly stiff wind behind me -- but, even still, the best I could do is get back up to a 7 minute pace. With that last mile at 7:19, that tells you how slow the first half mile was. But it was all my legs had in them.

If I had to find a reason, it would be 'everything'. Not resting enough after 3 different physical activities yesterday, crappy weather, heavy rain soaked shoes, relatively warm -- I'm sure I could come up with a couple of other things.

But if the goal was to work the muscles as hard as I could for a short period of time, you could definitely call the workout successful. I'll take what I can out of it. A couple of days rest and I'll hope to have a better tempo run in the heat of the Florida Keys!