Friday, March 18, 2011

The Truth About Intervals

I thought we did a great job as a team on our quality interval days this week. I thought Monday's Kenyan Runs went pretty well, and I thought Wednesday Australian Hills went extremely well. (When do we do American intervals, you ask?) This year, I feel like I have been moving away from relying on the watches so much, and just wanting the intervals to be HARD. This was inspired in part, by a blog post I discovered while mindlessly surfing the internet one night. Here it is, but be forewarned, not a lot of safe for work language. Try to get beyond that, though, and read it for what it is: a treatise on making your intervals HARD. Intervals should make you race faster, and in races, watches, heart rate, pace, they don't matter. So why should those factors matter in intervals? Just go out there on hard days and kill yourself.

Thoughts?

SEP


2 comments:

Steveo said...

100 percent agree. But only works if the team is mature enough to handle it. Knowing how to run "hard" will mean more to a runner at the end of a race than knowing how to run a split time.

Brian Seppala said...

Maturity. Good point. I think you *learn* to run hard with watches, splits, etc. But if you have mastered that, then you move to the next level, the more advanced level, of running HARD. Running your body into the ground based on feel. Knowing if you have any more left in the tank takes experience. It takes an mature athlete to be able to do that.