Track workout where tectonic plates did not pass me

Finally! I was able to run decently and did not see any tectonic plates passing me this time!

Last week after another disastrous interval workouts I was thinking about eliminating a few variables to find out what is causing my less than ideal performance. I nailed the reasons down to

-          Crazy mountain biking weekend

-          Tempo 90min ride the day before

-          Doing short sub-tempo run before the intervals was a shock to my body  

-          Biking to and from work that day

-          Wind

Things worked out the way that crazy weekend and tempo bike ride were eliminated and I cut sub-tempo to only 10min. Wind and biking to work stayed the same.

Workout was like this: 14min w/up, 10min sub-tempo at 6:45 pace (4:14; faster than what I did before because I figured that since it is shorter I can go little faster), 3x 1600m at 5k+5sec per km slower w/ 4 min jog.

Theoretical pace for those miles was 4-4:05/k (or somewhere around 6:25/mile).

I went 6:27, 6:25, 6:16. It was freaking easy. 4min jog is looong and I was recovered well and  before each interval felt like I was starting my first interval. First one was little slow, second one was ok but still slower than I would like to and the last one was little fast because I told myself to stop running laps and start running intervals. I went slow and then fast mostly because I was not able to check my splits. It was too dark outside and I could not see my watch while running. I could hardly see white lines on a track. It would have been better had I been able to see midway through how I was doing.

Thus it seems that those pathetic workouts last week and the week before were due to exhausting weekend combined with bike ride the day prior. I think that it was mostly the weekend, but I am going to test this theory next week (will do a harder ride one day and intervals the next day) and see how that goes.

Or maybe it was just my shiny-and-strange-blue-color new sneakers. Now I just need to buy Lulusomething shorts and I will be unstoppable!

I hope it was it and that I am back to normal! I will do 1k intervals tomorrow because I have done those a couple time in summer so I will be able to compare how I feel now and then. I did not do any sub-tempo/intervals combo this summer so cannot assess my progress (or degress if you will).

On a different note, I have been checking my TrainingPeaks account multiple times a day for past few days impatiently waiting for something to show up on it. And it finally did yesterday! Woo-hoo! Now, I somehow forgot that Michelle mentioned something about testing this first week and my enthusiasm might have been little curbed (is that a real expression or did I just make it up?) when I saw that FTP test on a bike and 1000 in a pool. Phew.