800m reps

I was slightly surprised to get a text suggesting reps this morning from Kenny, but I did not fancy another 120 minutes in the freezing cold so in spite of having done my first set of intervals in over a month only two days ago I decided to go for it. As Kenny pointed out, we have never actually done intervals together so it would be an interesting session.

I'm more of a do your reps on a route kinna guy while Kenny is in the backwards and forwards school of reps. I decided to go with his backwards forwards method, so if something bad happened we'd not be too far from home.

It had snowed overnight, just a light dusting, and while very cold the dusting of snow had neither frozen nor melted so was ok to run on. Kenny strategically placed the bottle of water 100m way from our start point so we had to wait until all six reps were cleared before we could get a glug, still it was a nice touch.

Having spent most of the previous evening trying to coax my Garmin in to metric then set up the "Advanced" workout I failed to press the start button (I was pressing lap) so captured no data until the 5th rep.

The first one was back to Harpenden from the Water station on the Harpenden to Luton cycle way, which has a slight incline on it. Barely noticeable on a normal run but as part of the 800m rep it made its presence felt.

We crashed through the first rep, I made a conscious effort to not bolt and hold the pace back at 10km. I think that worked, 2nd rep was hard. I felt good on the third and fourth. Kenny's footfalls just behind me were enough motivation to hold the pace on the last third. Tried to focus on form, staying light and upright with the speed coming from spinning the legs wide with the same cadence. Seemed to work ok as held of the big man. Finally, I worked out my Garmin issues and that gave me more confidence to let the gap between us grow (I was worried I'd do more if I could not hear Kenny's Garmin beep the end of the 800m) and push a shade harder. 5th was 3:45 with 156 max hrt and 6th was 3:48 with a max of 155. Took a minute to get back down to 120 which is pretty good for me.

Biggest issue today was gulping the freezing cold air at the end of each rep. Lungs could not cope with that. The two minute recovery felt just not enough which is exactly what we want.

As Kenny so aptly put it, that feels like the end of the Herts 10km. Yes. That's exactly the point. Job done.