I have all kinds of confused myself, today.  The programme said 5 x 400m intervals with a rest of 200m in-between each.  Don’t forget to warm up and cool down.  That’s what it said.

Learning the lesson of yesterday (Go early.  Eat something.  Seek shade.)  I set off for Oxford at 7am and ran intervals around University Parks at 7:30am after a quick breakfast of chia porridge.

I ran to the park at an easy pace, and completed my intervals at a pace of between 9:09min/mi and 9:46 min/mi (the target was 5k pace which is about 9:19 at my best, so that’s about right).  In total, I ran just over 2 miles.

I’ve downloaded Training Peaks, which does all kinds of scary stuff – it has my training programme synced with iCal, so that every run is in the calendar.  Then it syncs from my Garmin as I run so that in today’s calendar I can see the time I run, and my metrics.  And it then assigns a Red/Amber/Green to the day’s performance.  So I was quite pleased with this morning’s run and thought all was good – imagine my surprise when it was flagged red on the calendar.  Apparently, the intervals should have been part of a 5 mile overall run…. Must read the instructions better!

But today I was greatly helped by a kit inspector, helping make sure my socks were on the right foot, and my trainers were correctly laced.  It’s important to get these things right.  The kit(ten) inspector is only 9 weeks old, and has a lot to learn, but I think this programme will help us enormously…