Three Five's (slow, quick, slow)

Another run straight from work starting in Fawkner Park, just off Commercial Rd. Tonight I wanted to get a reasonable distance in and a little bit of speed work. What I decided in the end was a longer type of fartlek session. Either way I was going to get at least 15 km in and so I divided that into 5 km sections (using the Garmin). The plan was to run the first 5 km easy, the second 5 km hard and the last 5 km used as a recovery type run. I’ve never done this type of run before, such long sections between pace change. My thinking was, and I’m not sure if it’s valid, after completing the second 5 km at a quickish pace (for me that is) that should replicate my energy levels as if I had run a normal 20 km or longer run. I wanted to be stuffed but keep going. Surely this should help with long distance running. Well at 3.40 pm I was off running through Fawkner Park heading towards the Yarra River. At this time the rain started and only lasted for not more than five minutes. My session went according to plan. After the first 5 km I was well and truly warmed up and floored it, well not really sprinting but a heaps quicker pace at around 4.10 /km mark. I was surprised with my last 5 km. Initially just after the completion of the quickish 5, yeah I was stuffed, panting but shortly after I got back into my rythm and coasted home, all be it at a slower pace. All up I ran 15.88 km in a time of 1:15:30 for an average pace of 4:45 /km. Overall my maximum heart rate was 163 bpm and the average was 143 bpm. These figures alone don’t really tell the whole storey. The 5 km splits are as per the following:-

Split	Time	Pace	H/R
0-5	25:10	5:01	146 / 133
5-10	21:00	4:12	163 / 153
10-15	24:38	4:55	160 / 144
15 - 15.88	4:42	5:19	145 / 138

Further details can be found here at Motionbased.

Stats as of 3 May 2006

Today : 15.9

Prev 7 Days : 96.2

Prev 28 Days : 208.9

MTD : 39.9

YTD : 967.7

Month Avg : 193.5

Week Avg : 50.9

Total (2001) : 8708.8

Blogger Note The above table, I know, is all out of whack. Trialling different editors etc and even within Blogger.com the formatting of tables is one big pain in the a.... It's late now and I couldn't be bothered tinkering with this post any more.