Running streak: Terrible 2's

Showing posts with label Terrible 2's. Show all posts

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible two's. Yesterday I received a training plan that a friend purchased, which I plan to also follow, because, well, it turns out that maybe I'm a mooch. Since I haven't had a moment to read/study/understand the plan I decided that this week would be my last week of making up whatever I feel like before starting that highly structured plan in earnest...which meant that I had to think up some torturous work out for today since it's supposed to be a day that I include some sort of speed effort, per me. So, naturally I didn't come up with anything, instead I just asked Becca...she suggested another round of the terrible 2's, I asked how many, she said some absurdly high number (I hope she was kidding), to which I responded that I did 7 a few weeks ago, so she said, "do 8." I complained a bit, but knew then that 8 terrible 2's would be the work out of the day for me. Here is how they played out, in mileage, after a 1 mile warm up and then followed by a 1.69 mile cool down return home:

Basically almost exactly as they looked last time, with maybe a little slower running between terrible's...perhaps I'm getting weaker. Anyway, that is done, a few easy days then 17, broken up in 2 peices, with IronChad on Sunday, followed by starting the aforementioned plan...if I can understand it.

Ten minute slow warm up followed by 7 x terrible 2's concluded with a 4 minute cool down. Distance and pace are conservatively estimated as when I last did "2's" I averaged a faster pace and didn't do as many, but since I had no way of measuring the distance covered I just guessed conservatively based on overall time elapsed.

A very small volume of interval work today -- I call this work out the "Terrible 2's." I do slow warm up jogging for about 10 minutes and then go hard for 2 minutes followed by easy for two minutes and repeat etc. Today, as I am just starting to try to run with any speed to speak of, I decided I would do 5 terrible two's. They were hard as I expected, but not too horrible. I was probably too conservative with them, which I didn't feel bad about since it was my first time doing them in years. Here's how they played out from a distance covered perspective:

Adding the warm up and short cool down results in the overall mileage. The interval figures (or "Terrible 2's") equate to roughly 6 minute per mile pace during the hard two minutes and 9 minutes per mile during the easier two minutes -- per my Garmin 305 watch there was some fluctuation in pace, but at such short distance/duration those were not enough to have much affect on the distances covered as you can deduce from reviewing figures above. I will need to greatly increase my speed during the hard minutes and ideally also during the easy minutes I guess, but we'll have to see how that goes after monitoring perhaps monthly or so.
Yes, I should have run hills this morning instead, but I piddled around for too long after waking up and as a result only had time to do the above, which I've wanted to be able to convince myself to do for a while, so I guess it is better than nothing...and extended the streak, of course.