How did you feel during this run?
I came out of the blocks quite hot. After purchasing Jason Fitzgerald’s book about running, I decided to add a few elements to my warmup routine, including lunges, body weight squats and one or two extra movements that I don’t normally do before a treadmill session.
Why was the run split up?
I was suffering for most of the first session (3.29km according to Garmin Forerunner 35). The treadmill was set on 4 mins per km at 1% gradient.
I also needed to hit the bath room.
I guess you could say I chickened out a bit here. My heart rate was pumping in the 185 bpm region, and it felt a lot more difficult than my outdoor training session two days ago.
Did you you learn anything from this run?
Yip. I need to commit to the type of run that I’m going to do, rather than just jumping on the treadmill and seeing how long I can hold a good pace. This was actually a speed session. If I had approached it that way, I could have run faster, but with frequent rests.
Basically, there 4 different types of runs that I can choose from.
- Speed Session – Run faster than race pace but do it in 1km intervals.
- Easy run – A very comfortable 5km run. The goal is to just log the miles in a super comfortable fashion.
- Distance Session – Run 6km’s (or more) at a decent speed that’s fairly easy for me to maintain.
- Training Race – For these, I will try keep a good pace for the full 5km’s. It’s direct practice for race day, but not quite as intense.
I’m actually going to start doing it in that order. The easy run will happen after the speed session, because the speed session is likely to be the most physically demanding (if I do it properly). Then a distance session, followed by a practice race at 90% capacity.
Then I’m just going to loop through this cycle, and see if the gains start to come as a result.