So today I went out and realized that instead of having well over an hour for a nice run, I actually had 30 minutes tops before I had to be back, showered and ready to go to an appointment. Such is life.
Of course, the magic of running is that a little goes a long way, if you focus on quality. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to head back to the house without getting at least some mileage.
So I decided to do a little SpeedyMiles workout. What’s SpeedyMiles? Well, there’s likely a ton of names for this workout, but essentially it is running consecutive miles while recording negative splits for each mile. So if you run your first mile in 12 minutes, your next mile needs to take less time, and so on.
I let myself off easy (or so I thought) and just did a double. I didn’t really have time for more. A double is pretty easy because as long as you go fairly easy on the first mile, the second mile is easy to neg. Even if I REALLY went easy (a 13 mile per minute pace is my “doesn’t matter how far away it is” pace at the moment) I’d still have time to get home and be ready.
Of course, since this is me, I didn’t run a 13 pace. After a brief warmup, I ran the first mile in 10:52. In sandals. For me, that’s a fairly brisk pace these days. I’m usually about a minute slower per mile once I’m warmed up, and over that on my first mile.
Well, since I signed up for the ride, I decided to dive in and go for it. I had fresh legs and the air was brisk, so I pushed a bit and ran the second mile in 10:11. However, I managed that even after stopping for a bit for what I thought was an important text (you can see the bump right past the 1 mile mark above), which meant I had to push into 8:30 territory for a bit to make it up. It is good to know I can do that, especially in a fresh new pair of Luna Mono sandals.
The benefits of this workout are obviously that you work on tempo, and combine it with speed work of a sort. As you add more miles, you begin to push your limits, and eventually it gets very difficult to keep hitting the negative splits. However, if you look at the splits of a lot of endurance runners doing, for example, the marathon distance, many do neg all their splits.
One thing to note about this workout is that you do have to have some way of marking both time per split/lap and the distance. I do it the easy way and use Runkeeper to bark at me. You could also run on a track where the distance is known and time yourself with a watch (or have a friend/coach do it of course).
Total Distance: 2.00 miles
Total Time: 21:00 minutes
Split 1 Average Pace: 10:52
Split 2 Average Pace: 10:11
Total Average Pace: 10:32
Shoes: Luna Sandals Mono
