People ask me (especially my friends who run with iPods) what I think about or do to occupy my time during my runs. The answer is lots of stuff, like: looks at constellations and watch for falling stars; concentrate on my running form, which I do a lot; curse cars with high beams on in residential streets; curse wild animals who scare the crap out of me on residential streets; and much more.
Today I had planned to do 7x800 intervals at around 6:40 minute per mile pace. I got to my 5th interval and my mind started to wander. Here is a look into what was going on:
In order to run a sub 4 hour marathon, I need to average under a 9:09 minute per mile pace. However, I also know that if I plan to do 9:09, that is a recipe for a failed sub 4 goal because I'll have to pee, I'll have a shoe untie, I'll spill water all over myself or need to apply Vaseline or... you get the picture. I need a cushion. So what is a good cushion. How much faster should I go? 10, 15, 20 seconds per mile? Hmmmmmm. Well lets see, if we go one minute per mile faster, that's 26.2 minutes faster...don't need to go that fast; however, how much faster would 10 seconds per mile give me? I know, I'll divide 26.2 by 6 and that will give me splits for how much faster 10 seconds will give me. So 6 roughly goes into 26.2 4 times with 2/6 left over. Reduce that to 1/3 and multiply by 60 gives me 20. So, 10 seconds per mile faster results in 4 minutes and 20 seconds of cushion through 26.2 miles. Thus, running 8:50 pace will give me about an 8 minute cushion. Yes, I'll shoot for an 8:50 pace.Yes folks, that's what happens when my brain is left unchecked during a long workout; however, the problem, as we noted above, was that I was in the middle of interval number 5 and lost track of whether I was on lap 1 or lap 2 of my 800. I also discovered that my watch was no help because it only showed, lap pace, cumulative time and cumulative distance. It only gives me relevant data when I hit "lap" at the end of each interval. I decided that I had only done one lap and proceed to do one more at my 800 pace.
Can you see where this is going?
Yes, I finished that "second lap" only to discover that I had done 3 laps or 1200 meters at 800 pace, which would explain why I was sucking wind going down that final stretch. Doh!!! I did one more 800, paying very close attention to each lap this time, and was cooked. So I called it a day after 6 intervals.
Help me send my marathon finisher medal to a person who survived her fight with cancer by clicking on this link: http://pages.teamintraining.org/dm/pfchangs12/mnortonnpu
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