Mile reps

I thought I'd share last night's interval session with you, as I haven't yet gone into any detail of the sessions I'm doing. I had hoped to report a drift test on Tuesday, but it was just too windy. After the extreme fatigue of the last few days, I had wondered about the wisdom of pushing on with a full work session, but I felt great! Oh the ups and downs of base training!

The session was run with my club. While the others were doing 800m reps, I was doing an extra lap of the road circuit making 1740m plus a jog recover of 90secs. For no other reason than I seem to like looking at HR plots, here it is:

Perhaps more meaningful, here are the lap details:

1.1-mile laps with 90secs recovery. HR limited to 144bpm 83%MaxHR

Lap	Lap time	Mins/mile	bpm
1	8:26	7:49	135
2	8:23	7:46	140
3	8:28	7:50	140
4	8:26	7:48	141

I felt so fresh, and could easily have done more. What a contrast to the day before!

You can't really microanalyse these sessions, but there are few observations:

• These are the fastest mile reps I've ever done, despite the low ave HR - 80%maxHR!
• I'm now comfortable only taking 90secs rest - I used to take 3 minutes, although my HR was a lot higher then.
• My pace and HR are very consistent - lactate nicely under control
• The pace was what I ran my 10k PB at 11 days ago - 7:46/mile

That last point is interesting. I'm improving rapidly, but there can't be much difference in only 11 days. This means one of 2 things: You should be able to run mile reps at 10k pace with an average HR of only 80%maxHR - I suspect not. Alternatively, I was a touch stale for the Stubbington 10k and could actually now go much faster - I suspect this is nearer the truth. What ever the case, these are all good signs of my continued improvement.

BT rocks!