Looking forward to my run!

This afternoon, once I get this email done that I've been slaving over for a good 10 or 12 minutes, I'm going for my usual 3.5 mile run. But for a change, I'm looking forward to it. This is a normal, put-on-your-shoes-block-out-all-distractions kind of run. But I haven't done it for a week and I'm looking forward to a workout where I don't have to think about it while I'm doing it! Since the run last week I've done two sprint interval runs that take concentration and willpower to get through. I've done two swims where I have to think every stroke about how my body is positioned and where my arm is. I did one bike ride with mechanical problems and wind that took away all of the normal easy flying feeling of cycling. And now I'm back to this run. With any luck at all, it will be so uneventful and dull that it'll feel like a breeze. A nice, gentle breeze from behind, that is, not a 35 m.p.h. gust into my face.

Yesterday's workout was interesting. It was another sprint interval workout, but I was following a plan I found online that is done at a track. The total mileage is just over 4 miles, but a LOT of that is walking so it took over 50 minutes to do the whole thing. The sprint distances are roughly the same as what I've done on the road for interval training, but the recovery times are a lot longer and you're doing it on a track so it's all flat, which makes things easier. This workout has you alternating 100 yard/meter (not sure which I was doing--the track wasn't labeled so I'm not sure if it was a 400 yard track or a 400 meter track) sprints with increasingly short walking recoveries, so you sprint 100 meters, walk 400, sprint 100, walk 300, etc. down to 100/100 and then you start all over. My legs didn't feel trashed afterwards like they did last week (where I was doing more like sprint 100, walk 50) and the different recovery distances kept me on my toes so I didn't get bored.

I don't expect to see any change in my running speed or endurance today, but I'm assured that if I keep up with the sprint interval training, both my speed and endurance should improve within a few weeks. There might be a caveat on that assurance that this offer doesn't apply to middle aged women, but we'll see.