salvaging sprints

I tackled Chemistry for eons, and then joyously jogged the mile down to run club in NON-running clothes. Well, actually, I was wearing running clothes, but summer running clothes under my usual winter attire.

We were going to do sprints in an indoor track!! This was to be my first time in the Dome, the region's only 400M indoor track.

Alas, on our way there, we found out that it was temporarily closed due to an emergency, a burst water main, I think. Major bummer.

So I trudged back home (the distance shortened by the kindness of my friend, who dropped me off closer to home) and moped.

Well, it was karma because I'd meant to finish the chem assignment before going, but got tripped up on a couple of problems.

There was still time to do something outside, but after walking home in the -30 windchill or whatever it was for a few measely blocks, I'd already had enough of that.

Plus I was still wearing my summer running clothes. To exchange those for winter running clothes would have been conceding defeat.

So I went downstairs and got on that poor, increasingly-abused FitWalk machine. I put shoes on this time because I wanted to do more than 25 minutes. At first, I figured I would just jog/walk, like I usually do, but that got really boring after about 20 min. So then I figured, hey, I could do something sort of like the sprint workout I missed. I remembered it being 2X (6-8X 200M/60s rest), 3 minutes between sets. It was actually just 6X and 4 min between sets...close enough. Since we missed the 100M sprints last week too and I was feeling quite lazy, I figured I'd do 30s hard/60s easy (my 200M repeats last time were 38-40s). I did 2X (8X 30s) with 3 min in between, and then about 5 minutes afterwards as a cooldown, bringing me to 50:XX (forgot to check. The faster intervals made the workout go by a LOT more quickly.

But how far did I run? The counter on the FitWalk said 3 miles. I'm not sure if it's due to the incline or what, but that's kind of way off. When I'm jogging on it, I guesstimate that I go about 2X what it says, because usually my easy jogging is about 9:30-10:00/mile outside, and it's about 19:00-20:00/mile on that machine. LOL.

So, going by effort again...with those 30s, I could probably cover about 150M. 16 of those: 2400M. Then there are 14 60s intervals between those, which at a 10:00/mile pace would be about, gee, 1/10th of a mile or 160M....150M makes the math easier :). so 2100M of those. 3 min in between, same pace, 450M. Then 3200M warm up and goodness knows about the cooldown, let's say 800M. Total 8.950 km, or about 5.56 miles. phew! That sounds reasonable.

That's a good mental warm up for the rest of my chemistry assignment, I guess...

so 6.5 miles today, pretty much. Not bad. Hopefully we'll get to go to the Dome next week so I can just run and know what I'm running instead of guesstimating. At least with the FitWalk, though, I am still running. It's a little bit artificial but it's amazing how much harder it is to work the machine when my core or armswing gets lazy....I think it really does help with form.

I also resistance/core exercises. No pushups...I've been slipping with those.