Tuesday 19 July 2011

Interval sessions are a killer but boy do I feel good

I put my interval training off yesterday due to excessive muscle aching.  But after the massage today I had no excuses left in the excuse bank not to do intervals tonight.  I did try to delay it a little bit, because Anny is coming back from Spain tomorrow and I wanted to clean the apartment up for her.  So I spent an hour picking up anything lying around and doing the dishes and so on.  After that was over I decided it was now or never, because a slow jog in the late evening may not be that bad, but an interval session just before bed would mean a bad nights sleep most likely, as it would take the body hours to settle down afterwards.

Although it was raining outside I only put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt because I knew I would be able to keep myself warm enough through running.  Once outside I thought about my strategy and decided I would base myself from just outside the apartment and run in lots of different directions whilst doing the intervals so as to have a little bit of variation in scenery.  The benefit of doing the intervals on the running track is that you know exactly how far you have run when you do laps, but at the same time it does get a little boring.  This way though, like I did it tonight, you also have to contend with cars and people and dogs and basically anything else that may jump out in front of you when you are whizzing down the street, and it adds an extra element of interest.

I tried to maintain the bursts of high intensity running for at least a minute or so.  In between I didn't give myself time to completely calm down, but long enough that I wasn't gasping for breath.  The session lasted just under 20 minutes, covered 4.03km and consisted of 5 high intensity bursts.

Since I came back I feel great.  My whole body is warm inside, I can feel the blood pumping through my veins and my legs are tingling.  I normally hate intervals but if I will feel like this after doing them each time I will be doing them an awful lot more.

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