Week 2 - "Put the match down and step away from the orphanage..."

11th Jan:  Interval Training
Miles this week: 7
TOTAL MILES: 27

(1 mile at 9m30, then 4 x 1 mile at under 8m10 with 400mtr recovery jog in between, then 1 mile at 9m30)
Show me the map!

I believe I've mentioned my lack of enthusiasm for interval training.  What I didn't do is supply some detail, so I'll do that now.  (You can skip this bit; keep going down until you come to the "However".  It's there, I promise.)

Right.  Interval training.  Imagine the most evil thing you can think of in the next 3 seconds.  I'll wait.   ...   ...   ...  Right, in those 3 seconds I came up with someone setting fire to a box of kittens and hurling it into a petrol-dowsed orphanage.  Without doubt that is classified as evil, and certainly nothing that a reasonable human could contemplate, or condone.  But here's the thing:  the flaming-kitten incendiary device would be wholly unnecessary because the orphanage would already be on fire, started by me, because that's what interval training does to me!

This hatred of pace variations started a long time ago, when I was a wee nipper playing football.  In the early days, football training merely consisted of playing football, until, that was, the day that a new manager turned up with a bald head and a plan to make us the fittest team in the league.

So out went the long summer days of playing football, to be replaced by a new-fangled (for me, at least) idea of running quickly in one direction, jogging back to the start at a slower pace and then repeating this ad infinitum, all to the stirring cries of "my grandmother sprints faster than that!" and other such delights.

Us players held the view that we could simply stop training and go back to playing football the way we did in the beforetime.  No.  The support of too many fathers who had failed in their own footballing careers ensured that the bald manager created a new, perfectly legal way to torture small boys on Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings.

(One child did defy his father, but he never returned.  We would talk about him often, reverently passing on tales of the Boy Who Said No.  We’d also hang around his house at night, fully expecting the police to burst down his door at any moment and drag an irate father off to the gallows.)

So anyway.  No to interval training.

However.  (See?  Told you!)  With all that said, interval training is an effective weapon in the battle between body and fitness and so, reluctantly, I headed out of the house with my head hung low.

My knees were a problem for the first half a mile or so, but the pace was a mere slow jog at this point and so the aches and pains melted away as everything warmed up.

The next 5 miles, 4 of them at a fast (for me) pace, were actually better than I thought they would be.  Sure, they were tiring, but the intervals did their job and returned just enough pluck to ensure that I gave the next fast mile a good old fashioned British try.  The only real difficulty came in the 4th quick mile; it was a long, slow uphill stint for the first half of it, and for those who don't know what it's like to run uphill at speed, it is just about one of the most painful things you can do with your body that doesn't involve specialist equipment.

But I put my head down and got to the top of the hill and was rewarded with a final mile downhill at a slower pace to finish.  I felt good, the heart and lungs were one with the legs, and all in all I felt that maybe, for today at least, I could forgive the introduction of interval work into the schedule.

And then I got back home and re-read the schedule for the run.  There, in black and white, was the schedule.  3 miles at speed is what it said.  3.  Not 4.

Apropos of nothing, I am now planning a visit to a local orphanage.