all over the map

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.
Last day of the long weekend and I'm slipping into old habits again -- in bed after midnight and up after 8. Hopefully I'll get back on track tonight or I'm going to be getting into the office on the really late side given that these "shorter runs" that are part of the 3plus2 plan still take over an hour, not including stretching and clean-up. Fortunately, the SOOTTAD got back from dance camp today, and did the all-night dance thing last night, so she'll want to go to bed early.

Anyway, today's run was a track workout: 1mi(400m RI), 2mi(800m RI)/2x800m (400m RI). That is, a 1 mile interval with a 400m rest interval, a 2 mile interval with an 800m rest interval and then 2 800m intervals with a 400m rest interval between them. I could keep that in my head, mostly -- I ended up only giving myself a 200m rest between the 800s. What I couldn't keep in my head were the paces for each interval. The mile was supposed to be run in 7:18. I can mostly remember that. But I couldn't remember that the 400 split, to try and keep the laps relatively even, was supposed to be a little over 1:49. And the 800m intervals were supposed to be run in 3:31, equivalent to a 7:04mm or a 1:45 400m split. Thus the crude notes scrawly on my hand.

Not that it mattered -- I ended up mostly using the pace reading on my GPS.

Not that it really helped -- I found myself going all over the map as far as pace goes, although the average pace worked out to be faster than planned, at least. The fast, she is not so bad; the variation in pace, not so much. However, it's really difficult to modulate a few seconds off a minutes per mile pace, and it's exacerbated by the lag that exists as the GPS continually recalculates the pace. I was often finding myself running sub-7s and then overcompensating back and then running a few seconds per mile too slowly. The hysteresis, it's a killer.

More interestingly, it seemed like I was running the turns on the track much faster than the straights. I don't know if that has something to do with my form (knees more bent, leaning into the turn) or if there's some weird behavior of the GPS, like it's actually calculating velocity as opposed to speed, and taking into account direction. (This may not be the craziest thing, given that it is making guesses as to speed based on position.)