Intervals and my coffee

I stayed up a little too late last night watching King of the Nerds with my hubby, but it was so nice.  With all of our marathon training taking up the days/nights, it’s great just to reconnect over a beer and some downtime.  But luckily my late night (and that beer!) didn’t stop my this morning.  I had a great 9 miler with intervals.  The plan said 1000m, so that translated to .63 miles of running fast, and .37 of recovery.  I started the intervals out at 8:04 and finished with my last set at 7:30.  I really need to bump those up next time and challenge myself a little more because I’ve calculated my 5K pace really should be closer to 7:43.

I put some good effort into it, and then enjoyed big cup of iced coffee in celebration!  Iced mocha is my fav!!  I also tried out my new skirt and it passed with flying colors!

Here are some reasons you need to incorporate intervals into your marathon training….

WHY TO INCLUDE SPEED
The reason for including short, moderately fast workouts in marathon training is threefold:

1) Short, fast repeats improve your running economy (the amount of oxygen consumed at a given pace), and improved running economy is very important in the marathon. Think of it as getting better gas mileage–you can go longer before running out of gas.

2) Short, fast repeats break the monotony of training. Often, marathon training starts to put runners in a pace rut. Fast repeats challenge you to turn your legs over and help avoid the “marathoner shuffle.”

3) Short, fast repeats allow you to insert some volume of running at a pace that is significantly faster than marathon race pace.

Read more about that advice from McMillan:—>  (more)

I’m certain I don’t want any “marathoner shuffle”!!

Later, it was back to work – but luckily no moving of dusty boxes or computers today.  Just a bit more of solving technology issues.  Here is my “new space”.  It’s so lovely!  Too bad my desk is not in yet, so I have to work off of this plastic table for a week.  Sigh.  It will look awesome when it gets done though because I am making a promise right now to purge a bunch of stuff from my old space, and not to clutter this one up 🙂

Soon, I was transporting kids to a chess match.  Zachary won his game in a short period of time.  He thinks he may not have been paired with someone at his ability, but he’ll still accept the win!  He took about 10 mins to win his game.  Sydney spent 40 mins on her game.  At one point she was up with 2 queens, but made a key mistake and ended up losing.  Still, it was quite a match and she did great.

Q:  Do you prefer chess or checkers?

A: I prefer chess by far.  Checkers just annoys me!  My kids play chess so well, I should have paid attention during their lessons instead of reading celebrity magazines 🙂

Q:  Are you a “spring cleaner”?  Do you have an annual purge or cleaning, get rid of stuff along the way, or just hang on to everything?

A: I hate to admit it, but I hang on to things.  You just never know when you are going to need something!  But this year, I’m really going for some downsizing… starting with my office at work!