My First Speed Session

Train hard, run easy.  Words to live and die by.  Ha!  Last night was our first speedwork session at the clinic, and my first speedwork session ever.  So how did you I like it, you ask?

I hated it.

But...I know it's good for me and will ultimately make me a faster, stronger and better runner, so I'm putting my big girl panties on, sucking it up and just doing it, dammit!  After a quick warm up, we did mile repeats at what Jason said was supposed to be 80% of what would be full effort...we were to do four repeats with a two minute rest in betweeen (just enough time to catch your breath), so I knew I had to conserve a little energy and not run full out.  As we all lined up to take our places, I kept thinking what the hell is 80% of full effort?  I lined up at the back so as to avoid being embarrassed as people whipped past me and actually felt a little nervous...I was even more anxious because we were actually being timed on our intervals.

Off we went for our first repeat...my legs felt heavy from bootcamp that morning (yay, first double Jay day in a month!) but I actually like doing double days because it forces me to push through when I'm feeling tired - recreates how I'll be feeling at the 18K point when I want to curl up and die.  The first repeat didn't feel great - normally I need a bit of time to warm up, but I was pleasantly surprised when I finished and I had done a mile in 7:30!  Woohoo.  I took a two minute rest and then took off to do the next few repeats...the second and third ones were all around the same time and felt hard, but by the time I got to the fourth one I must have found my groove because the last one felt great...as I got to the halfway point, one of the clinic leaders yelled out "way to go, girl!  you're looking strong and awesome!!" which made me push even harder and it didn't hurt that he was kinda cute...tee hee.  I even tried to flash him a coy smile but I'm sure I looked more like the Joker, so I stuck with a big "thanks!" and a wave.  Jason was awesome too as he kept cheering us all on and shouting words of encouragement...he is so incredibly fabulous, I can't say enough about him.  He has this way of pushing you positively and making you want to try harder.  After the session, he came up and told me nice work as he knew I'd had a hard workout that morning, which made me feel pretty awesome.  Actually, the whole group is great...as the last few runners came in, everyone was clapping and cheering them on, which I thought was amazing.  What an awesome group of people! 

So, first speed session done.  It was hard...harder than I thought, because I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone and truthfully, it hurts.  With hills, I'm running slower but using more of my muscles to power myself up which somehow doesn't seem as hard.  At the end of the session, I checked out my Garmin and saw that my overall pace was 5:02/km, which I was thrilled with...target pace for the half is 5:15/km, so if I can continue to keep my speedwork at this level, hopefully race pace will seem easy on race day.

Train hard, race easy.  Very wise words.