Tuesday night is speed work in my current training plan and I alternate between intervals and tempo runs. So far, all of these runs have felt too easy. I feel like I should be pooped after speed work, and I haven’t been. Until today.

The plan for today’s run was to do a 10 min warm-up, then 20 minutes increasing speed to 10k pace, and a 5 minute cooldown.  This is a total of 35 minutes, but you already knew that didn’t you? Because you, like most people over 8 years old, know that 10+20+5=35. It’s simple addition. Unfortunately, at around 17 minutes, I forgot how to do simple addition. I thought my cooldown would start at 25 minutes. Wrong! So wrong! At 23 minutes, when I realized my mistake I was already running an 8 min/mile pace (31 seconds faster than my schedule calls for).

At this point, I had a few options: slow down and start increasing my speed from a more reasonable pace, hold my current pace for the rest of the run, or keep increasing like I was supposed to but end up at a much faster pace than originally planned.  I chose option 3! Which at 23 minutes was a questionable choice, and it didn’t get any easier as I sped up over the next 7 minutes.  I did make it though; I pushed all the way to a 7:30 min/mile pace which I held for 2 min before a wonderfully glorious cooldown.

It was exhausting! I’m glad I was able to push so hard, but I know the aim of the workout wasn’t to run as hard as I could, so next tempo run I’ll try to be better at adding 🙂

Thoughts of this dessert helped get me through the last few painful minutes:

It was delicious! And even better because I got to eat it while watching the Olympics. Now, off to bed!