My 20:20 Journey: Hill Repeats and Heavy Breathing

Yesterday I did 200 and 400m efforts.  Today, I did just four all out 150m efforts up an incline.  These efforts lasted about 40 seconds and kicked my butt.  When I finished the fourth one, I found myself breathing hard for over 10 minutes.  Two hours later my breathing was still a little heavy.  It's amazing what going all out will do to your metabolism.  My new journey has me doing a lot of these short hard efforts.

Modulating one's efforts during short sprints takes some effort.  I probably went a little easy on the first one today, and then got the next two just right, pushing as hard as I could for the entire 36-37 seconds.  The last one was interesting, because after about 120m, I felt like the switch turned off in terms of how my legs felt, but I ignored that and pushed as hard as I could, actually doing this fourth effort slightly faster than the first three.  Of course, I couldn't stop breathing hard for several minutes. The first three efforts were followed by about 2 minutes of walking.  There's no way that I could have done a fifth repeat with the way I was feeling after the fourth one.  But that's ok, this was my first attempt at doing these hill repeats.  I'm always (at least these days) cautious when it comes to how I handle the first attempts at new workouts.

The challenge of doing these short hard efforts is making sure that I recover enough in between these workouts to make the next one as productive as possible.  While I'll probably be tempted to follow up today's workout with another one tomorrow, I doubt that I'll truly be fresh enough to actually do that. Still, the temptation will be there.  I know myself pretty well.

My coach knows that I love these hard efforts.  There's nothing like literally being unable to breath a the end of an interval.  Combining that with the feeling that y our legs don't want to move, just adds to the enjoyment!  In a lot of ways, this is preparation for the feeling that I strive to have at the end of a 5K. I often say that the way to finish a 5K is with the feeling that you want to throw up.  I know that sounds crazy, but it's true.  It comes with the territory.  Normally, I'm used to feeling something similar at the end of a half ironman or ironman, but that's a different feeling.  It's got it's similarities, but it's associated with dead legs that aren't moving all that fast.  Ideally, at the end of a 5K, my legs will still be moving pretty fast, but I'll feel pretty much like I did at the end of my fourth interval today.  Ironically, my pace was about 6:20/mile, albeit, I was climbing about a 3% grade, and I already had some lactic acid buildup.    So, my training continues, on my way to 20:20.