After writing about my interval workout last week, I got some questions about the easiest way to start working speed work into a regular running routine.

I thought I'd share some of my tips and hope you would share some of your advice in the comments.

Mix in some fartleks:

Fartlek means "speed play" and it's one of the easiest ways to ease into more formal speedwork. Pick one of your runs and mix in some fast bursts of speed. For example, run hard until the end of the block, then slow down and recover for a while. Then pick up the speed again until you get to a tree or another landmark. Fartleks are really informal and there's no right or wrong way to do them so they're a really easy way to start.

Leave enough recovery time between intervals:

When I first started adding speed intervals to my workouts, I could never finish very strong because I wasn't giving myself enough time to recover. The amount of recovery time you need will depend on the length of your interval and how far you are going. When I did my three minute intervals last week, I gave myself one minute of recovery time between each. It was enough time to catch my breath and feel like I was getting a break mentally before picking the speed back up.

Don't go out too hard in the beginning:

Even though intervals are meant to be done fast, if you sprint your heart out on the first one, you won't have much energy left by the time you get to the last one. This is an area where I still struggle. You want to pick a pace that's challenging, but that you can sustain for the length of the workout.

Start with one day a week:

When you're first getting into speedwork, keep your faster session to one day each week. Your other runs should all be done at your normal pace to allow your muscles to recover and to help prevent injury.

What advice do you have for runners looking to build speedwork into a training plan?

On Tuesday my personal trainer warned me that I'd feel most of the soreness from all the squats and lunges that we did two days after the session.

He was right.

While I was sore yesterday, I'm even more sore today. And I'm very grateful that I have yoga tonight to help me loosen up.

I suspect the interval session I did yesterday morning is also contributing to my extra soreness this morning.

I'm playing around with different types of speedwork this training plan and yesterday I set out to do three-minute repeats at a 8 minute mile pace. I did seven repeats in total with a minute recovery in between each.

It was probably one of the toughest running workouts I've done this training cycle, but I felt fairly accomplished afterward.

I have a feeling after this week of intense workouts, yoga is going to feel awesome tonight.

One of the most frustrating things about marathon training is feeling myself getting slower and slower.


On my long runs, I know that's going to happen. There's no way I could run 20 miles at a 9 minute pace. But I can definitely manage a 10 minute per mile average.

However, it seems like that 10 minute mile is starting to rub off on my shorter runs. The two runs I've done so far this week have both been kind of slow. Or well, slower than I was running the same distances this summer.

I know I said going into marathon training that it was going to be flexible, that I was going to stop worrying about speed and just enjoy the distance.

But I was so happy to see my times drop this summer and it's just hard to see them creep back up.

For the next two and a half weeks, I'm going to try to let it go. I'm just about in to taper for the Philly Marathon and the last thing I need to be do is risk an injury because I start trying to push the pace again.

So this is me temporarily letting go of speed.

What have you had to let go in your training that took you a while to get used to?

Coming back from a long weekend at the beach and jumping right into training is rough!

Seriously I spent several days doing nothing but this:



So waking up to do intervals at 5 a.m. was not easy.

But I did it.

My schedule called for 5x400 at 5K pace. It's been a long time since I've run a 5K and I'm not really sure that my old 5K pace is the most accurate indicator of my speed lately. I decided to do each interval in less than two minutes to see how that I made me feel.

The first interval was tough, but after that I found I was going faster than two minutes for each interval. I'm not sure what my average pace worked out to, I couldn't get Garmin to cooperate that early in morning (user error for sure) so I don't have individual lap break downs.

I'll have to look at the speed issue a little more closely to find what pace using.

Since there's no track near my house that I can get to that early in the morning, I used a make shift track, which is also known as the sidewalk in front of my community. It's a very long and fairly flat stretch of sidewalk that I found works just as well. I measured it out yesterday so I have the right distance.

Nothing says speed work has to be done on a track.

Day one of training: in the books.

OK guys, I have a question. How smart is it to run a 10 mile race the weekend before the Virginia Beach Half Marathon, which I'm definitely considering my A-race for the season and hoping to achieve a sweet PR at?

I tried to make a pro/con list but I'm still not sure.

Pros:
It will be a good tune up for race weekend.
It will acclimate me to running a race in heat and humidity with lots of people before race day.
Practice those aid stations.
It's apparently a hugely fun and popular race (I'm considering the Annapolis 10 Mile)

Cons:
It's too close to the race.
What if I get hurt?
Will running it do more harm than good?
Will I have enough recovery time?
Is running 10 miles the weekend before a race bad for taper time?
Helllllp!!!

Please leave me your advice. I'm really torn about this race. I want to do it, but I want Virginia Beach to be an awesome race. Help!

Last night was some speed work. I was supposed to do 3x1600 at 9:31. But after the first 1600 I got bored. So I decided to break up the last two 1600s into 800s and do 4x800 at 8:57. That was much more entertaining for me and I liked pushing the faster pace and working on my foot turnover. I walked a quarter mile in between each 800 so I made sure to recover plenty. It was a pretty killer work out that total six miles with the warm up, cool down and recovery time.

Taught a pretty challenging yoga class afterward with lots of planks. Overall, an excellent night of workouts.

Since I'm in the office again today, no Jillian, but I will be teaching yoga tonight.

Last night I had my first bit of speed work on the schedule and boy, do I hate speed work, but I wasn't about to skip only my second run of training. (My shoes managed to dry out during the day. It was combo of shoving paper inside them and then giving them a quick blast with the hair dryer when I got home from work.)

Since I teach yoga at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, my plan was intervals on the treadmill so I could jump right off and go teach class.

I'm bad at coming up with my own speed work plans so I took some speed work suggestions from the SmartCoach plan thingy on Runner's World and last night called for 2 x 1600 at 9:36 with 800 jogs in between.

Unfortunately, the treadmill didn't have a speed setting for 9:36 miles, so I went with 9:31. Did my warm up mile, chugged through the first 1600 and then hopped to the sides of the treadmill to grabbed some water before jogging my 800.

I thought the second 1600 was going to kill me. Seriously people, I'm not fast and apparently I suck at trying to run fast. It was painful, it was not fun, but somehow I managed to get it done.

Yoga after that torture felt awesome.

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In other quick news, I had a disasterous experience at Safeway this morning. I never grocery shop at Safeway. I hate it. A lot. But it was the only grocery store locally that carries Oikos yogurt and since the awesome Kristinia was nice enough to hook me up with coupons to review it, I figured I'd better schlep my butt out to Safeway to pick some up.

While I was there I decided to grab a few other staples, like cottage cheese and hummus. Yea...they didn't have the kind I eat. They had little to no cottage cheese selection of the single serving packs and only the huge party size hummus tubs or the teeny tiny, why do they even bother to make this size, hummus containers.

I was really, really disappointed in the lack of selection.

Overall, I have yet to find a grocery store in Maryland that I truly love. I go to Giant because I can walk to it and they have pretty good selection, but nothing like the Giant back home in PA. (Owned by different companies).

OK, end grocery store rant. I am really really excited to try the Oikos Greek yogurt, and I'm definitely not going to let me crappy Safeway experience taint my review.

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On tap for tonight, yoga for sure. Maybe Jillian, my legs are still pretty dead from speedwork, so I'll have to see.

Normally I don't run with the BF ever. He's a 6'5" giant with insanely long legs so there's pretty much no way I, with my 5'6" normal-length legs, can keep up with him on runs of any sizable distance. But since he had a short two miler on his schedule for last night, I wanted to try to go out and see if I could keep up with him.

We did my normal out and back route by my house with lots of hills. I was thinking maybe the hills would slow him down a little bit because there aren't too many by his house where he normally runs. I'm not sure if the hills were the reason I was able to hang with him the whole time (and even finish before him by a step or two) or if it was my competitive streak not wanting to be left in the dust, but I somehow managed to do it.

We ran 2.32 miles in 21:00, that's about a nine minute mile. Speedy for me, pretty much par for the course for the BF.

It felt good to get some speedy running in even though I hated it while I was doing it. Afterward though I felt like I had accomplished something because if I can do Level 2 of Jillian and then go keep up with BF and crank out some speedy miles, it's a pretty good day in my book.

Also, I have officially turned BF into a running nerd. As soon as we got home he was all about going inside and mapping it out on MapMyRun to get the exact distance. Then when we were getting ready to walk over to the grocery store for dinner he changed out of his running shoes and his running socks and I was like um you don't have to change your socks. He said something along the lines of "These socks are only for running. They're too good for my crappy shoes."

(Edit: I stand corrected. BF pointed out his exact quote was "These socks aren't compatible with my old shoes.")

Apparently I also made him a sock snob. Mwahaha!

After months and months of shunning the gym for the warm summer months of running outside, lately I've been finding myself heading back indoors.

It's been pitch black when I wake up in the mornings and I don't have very much daylight left by the time I get home from work.

It started out with a few spin classes here and there, a couple times each week. This morning was the first time I forced myself onto the thrillmill though.

I met my co-worker Michele this morning and did about 20 minutes of elliptical with her before she had to head home to get ready for work (poor girl starts an hour before I do.)

When she left I switched over to the treadmill and thought I'd be adventurous and do some intervals. I know they were on the treadmill so it's not the same as doing them on a track, but these days track access is not really an option. So it looks like I'll be doing most of my speed work on the treadmill. (Does anyone have thoughts on this or suggestions on how to adjust the speed to make it most mirror the effort I'd be putting out on a track?)

I didn't have much time left so I figured I'd try to do 4x800 with an 800 recovery in between each. (I never know how long to recover after my intervals. Is 800 too long? It seems to work for me...again thoughts?)

Well I ran out of time and only did 3x800, but I figured it was something. I did my fast intervals at an 8:57 pace and my recovery was at 10:54. I could definitely feel that the effort was challenging so I think I did an OK job picking out speeds, but as always your thoughts or suggestions are helpful.

By the end with cool down and everything, I had done a little less than 30 minutes on the thrillmill and 20 minutes of the random hill setting on the elliptical.

A solid workout in my book.

P.S. Thanks for everyone's input on my last post about my marathon worries. After today's workout I'm feeling better about things and I'm going to see how I feel in another week or so.

P.P.S. How annoying is it the Game 5 got postponed last night? And how really pissed was I this morning when I found out the commish was going to suspend the game either way and not call it after the 5th and magically make the Phils win. (Which I think was the right decision, a World Series shouldn't be decided by the rain.) But why did they even play the top of the 6th then? The conditions were crappy. They should have called it after five and the Phils would have had a one-run lead. No way the Rays second run would have scored if it hadn't been for the rain. OK end rant about baseball.

Last night I headed to the track again last night for some more interval work. It's the first time I'd run since last week when I did intervals because I was super busy over the weekend.

My plan was from my friend Josh, the runner without a blog, who recommended I try 8x400's on 2:00 with 1:30 rest in between. This was a pretty good plan. But I modified it a bit because after the first one I knew 2 minutes was going to be too fast.

So instead I did 1x400 in 2:05 and the other 9x800 in 2:10.

I got really bad shin splints though. I probably should have stopped after interval number five, but I convinced myself I could push through the last three.

Probably not smart. But I did my mile warm up and stretched and then still got the shin splints. I only did a half mile cool down because they were really bothering me by the end.

Overall, it wasn't a bad workout except for the shin splints. And I checked out that calculator many of you recommended. My recommended time was 2:16-2:19, but I was running at 2:10 pretty comfortably so I think I might stick with that for next week.

ORN:
4.5 miles, between 45 mins and an hour

Last night I did my first ever interval workout at the track. I have to give some props to my friend Josh (no blog to link too) for setting me up with the workout.

Josh is another runner who was on his high school track and cross country teams and still runs a bunch in college. But now he's laid up with a broken leg and it's going to be a little while until he can get back to running. In the meantime he's taken to helping me out with my training.

I'm pretty grateful for the help because I didn't know the first thing about doing a track workout. I mean I know the basics. Run a mile warm up, stretch, do some intervals, mile cool down, stretch. I also knew that a mile on the track is four laps. But that was about the extent of my track knowledge.

So Josh and I fiddled with my times and he suggested I try 6-8X600 on a 2:50 to 3 minute interval and recover for 200 meters in 90 seconds.

Here's how things went. I did six of the intervals and finished the first five in the three minutes. The last one I think took me a little longer. My problem was the recovery. Josh suggested I walk the last 200 meters so my legs wouldn't burn out too bad, but I couldn't walk it in 90 seconds. So instead I walked it in 2-2:30 minutes.

I also skipped the mile cool down because I wanted to get home in time for the soccer game. My D.C. United was playing the Chicago Fire on ESPN2. Both United and the Fire are home to a few Maryland soccer alums (see here, here and here) so I was pretty pumped. (Unfortunately DCU lost 2-0. I'll chalk it up to seriously uninspired play and a ton of injuries, including one of my favorite players.

Shame on me for skipping the cool down, but I stretched really well.

My legs felt dead during repeats five and six. It's been a really long time since I pushed myself in my running. Usually I just go out for a run and if I go faster than normal so be it. I've never really made an attempt to work at it. But I think it's something I'm going to try to fit in once a week or so.

Josh's suggestion for next week was to try 8X400 in two minutes, but I forget how much rest he suggested. I'll have to double check that.

ORN:
4 miles total in intervals, total time somewhere around 45 minutes

Hot damn this blister hurts like bitch! It is huge and makes my left pinky toe twice it's normal size.

Normally I love my blisters and laugh at them and it's all good times, but that's because I've never had one that hurt this much. I'm limping around the office like a moron.

(I tried to snap a pic of it on my camera phone to post here, but it wasn't working so well...and sitting at my desk with my sock off taking pictures of my toe was probably going to start freaking the co-workers out...so apologies peeps...I know how much you love those pics.)

It's so bad, I don't think I'm going to be able to play soccer tonight. It kills having my work shoes on (I've tried to stealthly keep them off under my desk for most the day). I have no idea how I'm going to jam it in a cleat and then try to run around on it, when I can barely walk on it now.

I've got a band-aid on it and I'll make a go of soccer, but who knows how that will go.

In workout news, Tuesday's lifting was good even though I overslept and had a shortened session.

This morning's run went well. It was a speed day. So I warmed up for five minutes than cranked it to 5.5 for another five. Then 6.0 and then from minutes 15-20 I went from 6.5 to 6.9. Whoo I was like flying haha.

I slowed it back down to 6.0 for five more minutes and then finished up at 5.5. All in all, a pretty solid workout.

Still haven't decided about the two half marathons. I want to do it, but I'm not sure if I have the dinero to pay the entry fee haha.

I feel like this morning's run was the first solid one I've had in a while. Things felt pretty good and I was able to push the speed on the treadmill to 6.5.

I did my usual warm up and then started pushing the speed by .5 every five minutes. I topped off at 6.5 from minutes 15-20 and then brought it down to 6.0 til 25 minutes and then dropped it to 5.5 to 30 minutes.

I kicked it back up to 6.0 from 30-35 and finished off the last five minutes at 5.5.

The only thing that bothered me was my left heel a little bit in the beginning. It faded after about 5 minutes or so, but I'm wondering if this might be an early warning sign that it's time to get new shoes.

My biggest fear with the upcoming race is that my shoes will bonk out the day of the race and that would probably be the worst thing in the entire world.

So what do you guys think. Time to go cash in for a new pair of Mizunos?

The last two days I've gotten in solid runs that continue to boost my confidence about this half marathon I have coming up.

Wednesday I had scheduled a 40 minute challenging run. I decided that I wanted to try some speed work on the treadmill. I took it easy though because I remembered how poorly things turned out last Monday when I tried to do some speed.

My plan for the run was this: Warm up 5 minutes at 5.o mph. Increase to 5.5 mph for the next five minutes. From there crank the speed up to 6.5 mph for a quarter mile interval and then pull it back down to 5.5 for a half mile of recovery. Repeat until the last 30 minutes of the run were up.

I decided to do half mile recovery because I wanted to make sure I wasn't pushing myself too hard and I didn't want to risk any shin splints or anything. Looking back on it thought I probably could have just done a quarter mile recovery in between each speed set. That will most likely be my plan for next time.

This morning's run was a scheduled 30 minute easy run. But let's be honest, on the treadmill I need to play with either speed or incline to keep myself from getting horribly bored.

So here's what I did: I started out the first 5 minutes at 5.0 mph, and again increased to 5.5 mph for the next five minutes. From there I added .1 mph every minute for the next 10 minutes. My speed topped out at 6.5 mph for one minute. For the last ten minutes I decreased the speed .1 mph, ending on a nice easy 5.5 mph.

I'm not sure what kind of run you could even call that. It wasn't exactly the "easy" run I was supposed to do today, but it wasn't super challenging either.

Tomorrow's another cross-training day and I think I'm going to try to hit the 5:45 a.m. spinning class again.

Catch ya' later!