Friday, February 26, 2010

Good workouts and preparing mentally

Yesterday I put in a solid bike ride, cruise intervals (zone 4 hr) 5x6 minutes. This workout gets more and more encouraging every time I do it. It just shows me that I have the fitness level to handle race pace already for a long period of time... and the fact that I'm doing it on the trainer elevates that further, since the trainer is much harder to raise the heart rate on. My legs were strong and I kept a high RPM, so my bike technique is vastly improved, since I was doing 75-85 RPM just a couple months ago. And my legs weren't too tight or at all sore afterward.

This AM I did tpace 12x100s, with 10 second recoveries. I aimed for 1:26 pace and of course did the first one too fast, in 1:21. But again, I wasn't feeling exhausted... just like in all of my recent swims. I consciously slowed down the next 100s, doing what I felt was 1:26 pace... I was actually swimming 1:24! Consistently! For the 11 remaining 100s! That's huge, for me. I've been barely at the 1:26 mark, and I'm already doing 1:24s comfortably. When I finished the 100s, I still had enough strength to do a 500m cooldown... so my endurance is going up with my speed. Fantastic.

Feeling pretty nervous about the 5K this weekend. I'll be running at a pace I've never run before, and while I'm pretty sure I can keep a 5:10 pace, it's still a struggle to totally convince myself. I'll do everything I can to reach that goal.

1 comment:

  1. Trust your fitness. You are a totally different runner than you were 4 months ago.

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