Day Two of Interval Training

The other day I talked about how I was going to work on doing interval training to see if I can improve my run time for the 5k. After I talked about doing so, I read a lot the next day about how to go about doing effective interval training. I learned the low speed I had planned on wasn't low enough and my high speed wasn't high enough. I was only going from a low speed of 5 mph to a high speed of 7 mph. One source suggested that to have success with interval training the runner should really slow down. A significant difference needs to be evident for the interval training to be effective. Because of this advice, I changed my workout strategy. I ended up warming up at 5 mph for five minutes then went to 8 mph for 30 seconds then down to 4 mph for a minute and repeated this 8 mph/4 mph back and forth for 20 minutes. I loved it. And according to my treadmill, I did 2 miles in under 22 minutes. I've struggled with running an 11 minute mile but was able to do it by doing the interval training.

Today I did bike for 20 minutes, doing interval training. My interval low was 10 mph and the high was 17 miles per hour. After 20 minutes on the bike, I went to the treadmill and continued the interval training for another 10 minutes, doing the 4 mph/8 mph back and forth. My heart was pounding, but I truly felt like I worked out compared to what I was doing before. While I was running three miles and working up a little bit of a sweat, my heart rate wasn't rising all that much. Today, especially on the bike, I was feeling it. When I came in and calculated my calories burned, I found I'm burning more calories in much less time than I had been doing with my very comfortable three miles. I'm really hoping by April I will see a significant difference in how long I can go at the higher speeds. I need to be able to sustain these higher speeds for longer than 30 seconds. I also know I need to go for longer than 30 minutes when I work out. I'm going to shoot for adding a couple of minutes to each workout now; I figure two minutes tomorrow, three minutes Tuesday, etc. will be helpful.

Overall, I think I'm on the right track. I guess I'll know for sure come April.

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