Nine Point Five Seconds

The other day, my wife asked me how long of a run I was going for.  I told her 9 seconds.  What I meant was that I was running 9 second intervals.  This is very different than going out and running for 3 or 4 hours straight.  It's my new way of training.  It's different, but it's got its own challenges.  I've been working my way up from doing two of them to four, to six, and today I managed to do eight.  I'm pretty much locked into running my approximately 55m stretch of asphalt in 9.5 seconds, give or take 0.15 seconds on either side.  I mentally try to go faster, but my body won't let me.  It's very interesting.  I know from my coach that 8 seconds is really the physiologic time frame that these intervals are focused on.  From a mitochondrial perspective, it's about 8 seconds of sprinting.

An eight second sprint effort engages the anaerobic-alactic system.  There is something called the phosphogen system, which is basically ATP being generated by ADP and creatine phosphate without oxygen.  That's what happens.  After 8-10 seconds, you need to engage other systems. We'll talk about that another day.

In order to go faster during my 55m sprint, I probably need to continue to increase the strength of my muscles. At the same time, the exercise itself is strengthening, insofar as a few weeks ago, I couldn't have done 8 of these.  Today, I was very happy that I began to mentally engage my muscles for the effort and maintain my speed throughout the 8 intervals.  I did this by breaking down the interval into segments.  Since the sprint is done flying, I am already moving at the start, though comfortably.  At the moment I hit the starting line, that's when I hit the first jetpack and take off.  Over the course of my intervals today, I identified a couple of more spots on the segment where I mentally hit the booster rockets.

By hitting the booster rockets along the way, I managed to maintain my speed through 8 intervals today.  Somehow, I'd like to see if I can go faster than my fastest interval, which has been ~9.35 seconds.  Right now, 0.35 seconds might as well be like improving my 5K time by 3 minutes, or my marathon time by half an hour.  Which is pretty remarkable, in and of itself.  So, I'll stick with the fact that I've been able to hold 9.5 seconds eight times, and see where that takes me.  Improving my 5K speed, one metabolic system at a time.