6 x 880 - 9/10

Today's workout was to do 6 x 880's at a 5-10k pace, with a 2 minute break in between. An 880 is 880 yards, or two times around a 1/4 mile track. So whereas the speed workouts the previous two weeks were based on an entire mile, today's goal was to increase intensity a little bit, but for a shorter length of time. The total workout distance of 3 miles was unchanged.

Earlier this week, a friend of mine who is training for a full marathon, and following the Jeff Galloway plan, remarked to me that during his speed workout, he was able to see the thought process behind it. Basically, he found that during the real workout sections of the speed repeats, his HR would get into the interval training zone, but the walk rests that were placed throughout the workout were to get the HR back down to a cool down. This process would then repeat itself however many times the workout called for. The details were slightly different, but that is the quick way to sum it up.

After the 2nd 880, I started finding the same thing. I decided that my target HR during the 880 would be 170, or 85% of my max heartrate. Since I was able to do the mile repeats at 165, I figured I could ramp it up a little further, given that these repeats were half the distance. The first interval I started out too fast (typical) - but I definately found that during the 2 minute rest phase (in which I kept jogging, albeit at a slow pace, as I didn't know whether the rest was to be a walk or not), my HR would come down to the 150-155 range - right about the range for the long run workouts.

Lap 1 - 4:30 Avg HR 143 (warmup 880)
Lap 2 - 3:14 Avg HR 171
Lap 3 - 3:37 Avg HR 170
Lap 4 - 3:47 Avg HR 168
Lap 5 - 3:51 Avg HR 167
Lap 6 - 3:46 Avg HR 166
Lap 7 - 3:39 Avg HR 168

Total Time (excluding warmup and rest): 21:54
Total Distance (excluding warmup and rest): 3 Miles

So I definately tailed off, time wise, a little bit as the workout went on - but I suppose that is to be expected. I found that during the latter repeats, the first 440 was just getting the HR back up to 170, while the second 440 was more sustained at 170. So the average tended to be lower than 170.