Very traditional 8 x 400m interval run tonight after work with an additional 4 x 200m sprints at the end.  I changed at work and went to a local park near the office which offered a far superior interval running experience to running on the busy, uneven streets near my home.

The detailed splits will be at the bottom of the post but overall it felt pretty good.  I might could have pushed a little harder on the work intervals, but also maybe not.  I’m not great at judging my pace or perceived effort right now.  I need a few more weeks of hard efforts under my belt to be able to subjectively judge things like that.  

I warmed up a little more deliberately tonight.  I set the workout on my Garmin to have a 7 minute timed warm-up.  I started out at an “Airborne shuffle” pace and ramped up very gradually to a moderate job.  Half way through, when my joints were feeling loosened up, I started doing some strides.  Strides are gradual accelerations up to 70-80% of your max speed concentrating on maintaining good form and decelerating back to a jog.  A single “stride” should only last 20-30 seconds and should be high focus, not high effort.  

Overall, I think the improved warm up definitely made a positive impact on my workout.  In fact, I think in the future I will probably increase the warm up period to 10 minutes and give myself more time and strides to loosen up my legs and get ready for the main set training.

The only negative is that I’m experiencing some sharp pains on the inside of my left ankle.  It’s not debilitating and I think it’s just a touch of soreness/tendonitis from the rapid increase in volume of running.  To make sure I don’t exacerbate it what I’m going to do for the rest of October (starting tomorrow) is replace the two weekly easy runs with alternate, low impact cardio (swimming and biking).  I’ll keep doing the key run workouts as long as it doesn’t get any worse and after two weeks I’ll see how my ankle is holding up and reevaluate.

Tonight’s splits: