The Astros game last night
The Astros game last night was a tease. They were playing well, up 4-1, and even when the Twins came back and took the lead, the 'stros managed to stretch it to extra innings with Preston Wilson's 2 outs, 2 strikes homer in the bottom of the 9th. But then they lost it on a Twins homer on the very first pitch of the top of the 10th. And the Astros struck out one-two-three in the bottom. Sigh. In allowing the Twins to crawl to .500, the Astros are in danger of dipping back below that mark themselves.
I left work early (at least early for me lately) at 4:30 to get in my run. Today I'm feeling a little under the weather -- achey, mainly. I'm not sure if I'm coming down with something or if I'm just tired. With the game last night, I went to bed late, and got up early. Five hours of sleep doesn't really cut it for me.
Schedule: Run, 2-3 miles easy
Actual: 3 miles moderate, 32:22 - 10:46/mile, 185 avg HR
At the HARRA banquet last Saturday night, Jeff Galloway mentioned one of his trainees who ran a 4:00 marathon by running/walking in a 1/1 pattern for 20 miles before running the last 10K, and it had me wondering what sort of pace I would average if I ran a minute, walked a minute. It also had me wondering whether I would feel less spent at the end of a run. Feeling tired and not all that excited about running last night, I decided to give it a try.
I ran a minute, walked a minute, until I'd completed three miles. My splits were 10:33, 11:03, and 10:46 -- almost certainly a bit faster than what I'd have been able to pull off if I'd run straight through.
It's almost as if I did a 16 x ~250 speed workout. My running intervals were, of course, faster than I could have managed without the walking breaks. I made sure that my walking was brisk, but enough to recover. About halfway through, with 8-9 running intervals under my belt, I started to get more tired and the running became tougher. My pace may have slowed slightly. And at the end of the three miles, I felt about the same as I think I would've after a steady run. One big downside of the method, in my opinion, was the stress of the constant watch-watching.
So I don't really have any conclusions about whether I like the 1/1 method any better. I don't plan to start doing it regularly. But it's a nice psychological boost to know that I can maintain a nice average pace while walking half of the distance, and I'll probably end up doing the 1/1 thing again the next time I don't feel like running but need to get a workout in.
Pretty interesting. I've heard several stories about runners, sub-4:00 runners even that incorporated walk breaks into their marathon and improved their time immensely. Even a 5/1 or 3/1 would probably be good.
Vic, yeah, I'm actually thinking that the next time I do a structured run/walk workout, I'll try a different interval. I was thinking 4/1. 1/1 was almost too much clock-watching for me. We'll see.
My boss used to be a Minnesota Twin.
The problem with walk / running is that it doesn't really scale all that well. Jeff Galloway is a famous runner who was once top-class; he could probably run a 4:00 marathon backwards on 1 foot. He makes money by encouraging people to run/walk. I can buy the run 10 minutes or 5 minutes / walk one for long distances, but if you're running 1 / walking 1 I think you would lose some of the satisfaction of *running* a race to finish it, equal time or no.
Yeah, I tend to agree Jen. I couldn't run a whole race at 1/1. Even a half hour got to be frustrating. But the mental effect of knowing I had a break coming up soon was really nice.
When I did the marathon, I walked through all the water stations. That worked pretty well for me until the last couple miles, when I walked a bit more because I was getting tired.