I am attempting speed work

Core workout #1 postscript: my obliques were a little sore today - a result of the planks and maybe the fact I do situps with a twist - elbow to opposite knee - which is how I remember my dad doing them when I was young.
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Figuring that Friday would be a bad day for speed work, since it comes immediately before long run days in the calender, I'll have to opt for Mondays or Wednesdays for that kind of punishment, so today, Wednesday the 2nd, was my first attempt at real speedwork. Not just a tempo run or fartlek, neither of which really needs a watch, but a timed interval workout. I programmed the workout in the Polar software and managed to upload it to my watch on the first try. Things are looking up.

The workout was slated to be a mile warmup, 3 x .2 mi repeats with .1 mile recoveries, then a mile cooldown. Yeah.

This was a tough one. I didn't have a lot of walking, but there were a few blocks worth. Frankly, it was rather cold and very windy out there and that took a lot out of me just in the warmup. I didn't actually start to FEEL warm until the intervals. I tried to pay attention to the heart rate monitor and go by that. I realized that pace doesn't actually matter, as long as the heart rate is in the desired zone. But I wasn't able to keep up a hard pace during the 400 yard intervals and generally had to slow down a lot during the last 100 yards. The mile of cooldown just sucked generally, not specifically.



As you can see from the chart, I generally managed the goal of putting my heart rate in the correct zones at the correct times. Still, this was a very lump speed workout - I presume I'll get better at this with time. I'll probably repeat this one next week and then try for a build-up/cut-down style the week after.

I agree the graphs are confusing, though I'm learning how to see them. I am going to shut off the altitude function, though, to help clean up the graphs. The neat thing is that the pre-programmed splits are shown. Oddly enough, they aren't at the perfect distances I'd programmed, but are off by as much as 100 yards. Close enough for speedwork, though.

I did have one high point, though, and that's that I managed to get the Polar software working and my watch syncing to it via Parallels software. Now I don't have to boot into Vista to sync my watch; I can just boot into my XP install in Parallels. I'll leave the Vista partition for work-related matters.