20141210

Hot Wash

This week was a surprisingly warm week for running. And a low mileage week, too. However, I’d still like to think that I got something out of this week’s running by doing some speed work. What is speed work? Well, for me it means that during a run you spend a portion of that run going faster than “normal.” On Thanksgiving I went out for an early morning run and was rather bored and still was 4 miles from home.

I decided to do some speed work just to break up the monotony. Along this particular stretch of road are many fire hydrants and my plan was that I would increase my speed from the first fire hydrant to the third fire hydrant then slow down between the third and fourth. Once I got to the fourth it would then become my imaginary first fire hydrant again and I would start the exercise over.

There are many variations to this kind of speed work that can be done. This past week I was counting steps. It was 100 steps fast and 35 steps slow – repeated a couple of times.

I know that if you read online there are all sorts of names for these kinds of exercises that sound much more scientific but I tend to think that the basic idea is to increase the time spent running at a faster pace.

I also ran a 10k this past week that I’ll share more info about at a later time. For several reasons it was one of the best races I’ve ever ran.

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