A.M. In the line of my yesterday's reasoning I decided to try a ladder to see how it would feel. Did it on the flat portion of the trail with 200 recovery. The idea was that if I knew the next interval would be shorter, I would not be afraid to give the current one a push. At the same time, 200 recovery is not very much, and the length of the intervals stayed decent for a while, so I would not be able to just power my way through the intervals, and would have to relax some to be able to sustain the pace. I am pleased to report that it worked quite well. I hit the following splits: 1200 - 3:58.7, 1000 - 3:16.9, 800 - 2:37.7, 600 - 1:56.9, 400 - 73.3, 200 - 34.3. So I hit sub-5:20 pace on all of the intervals without slippage all the way to the dark side, and was even able to run a 73 quarter followed by a 34 200 while quite fatigued from the earlier intervals. So the trick of gradually shortening the interval did work in helping me break out of the rut a bit. What I liked even better is that I dealt with fatigue by relaxing instead of just slowing down. Then I ran 4.6 with Benjamin (1 of it with Joseph). We did 400 in 83, and then 800 in 2:47. Then 2 with Jenny and Julia. P.M. Did an "always on the run" mile.
| 