Speedwork Begins

Now that I have laid a solid base of running in this first almost month of marathon training, it was time to begin incorporating some speedwork into my routines.  I have been feeling kind of sluggish lately, though I've still been hitting my paces.  I was hoping this workout would shake things up and remind me that I can still run fast.  On the plan was a short but sweet 4 x 800 set.  There is a general rule of running each 800 in a time that is the equivilent to the goal time of your marathon.  I took off on the first one at a comfortable fast pace that I felt I could do for all 4.  After I ran the first 800 in 2:59, I realized that I was probably going to run these 800s in a faster pace than my goal time in the marathon.  I am definately NOT going to run 2:59 in the marathon, though I wouldn't be sad if I did ;)  Thoughts of the workout took me back to the days of high school.  Only, in high school I ran these much faster.  My splits were:

1) 2:59

2) 3:08

3) 3:02

4)2:59

I tried to keep them somewhat consistent, but took the middle two a little easier because my gut said to hold back a little to see how my body felt at the half way point.  Turns out, I felt fine and ran the last one as hard as the first.  I still could have pushed much harder, but didn't want to blow my legs out too much, since I have my 14 miler coming up on Saturday.  I'm sure I'll be plenty sore from this workout, since I haven't run this fast in a while.  In all, I think the workout was a nice way of waking my system up.  I'll be rotating between these and increasing number of 800 and hill repeats every other week to build some extra speed and power.  I hope it translates into feeling much better on my future runs.