At 44, it's pretty impressive that I'm still capable of hitting 2:36 min/km at the top end.
I've always loved running. I find it freeing. I feel such joy getting outside and moving over the land this way.
Tonight we joined another running mate on this planned speed work session. It appealed to us because we didn't have to think or figure anything out, we just copied him to the best of our abilities.
He's a machine, so doing his warm up and dynamic stretches was easy, but keeping up with him for his 30 second sprints was near impossible.
Nearly.
As I watched him, I figured that once I was properly warmed up I could probably give chase at least once.
I did and I could. I beat him home for just one run through, where we hovered around the 2:40 pace.
The rest of mine were somewhere between 3:05-3:10 for the early ones and 3:30-3:40 for the later ones.
Here's my cool graph from Garmin Connect...
If you know much about cadence, you'll see we did a LOT of very slow walking between each sprint set!
Meanwhile, according to my watch this wasn't actually that hard of a run. It FELT like every one of those sprints was in Zone 4, with the exception of the super fast one which I would have said was Zone 5.
So, which is right? My 7+ year old wrist watch trying to take my heart rate using only light or my subjective sense of perception?
I guess we'll never know. All I can tell you is...
That felt hard. And apparently I can still run fast.
Lucky me.