Garmin Logs Don't Lie

Today was our usual Friday Terrier marathon practice. I woke up feeling surprisingly rested considering that I went to bed at 1:30am having eaten half a bag of popcorn for dinner, and only slept till 5:30 am. I arrived to practice mid-warmup, per usual. In theory I suppose I could get up earlier and attempt to take the 5:41 am bus instead of the 5:51 am bus but it's pretty doubtful that will ever happen. The only workout I can manage to get to ontime 60% of the time is WFBC and that's ONLY because I hate carrying water jugs up the stairs and having everyone else pay for my inability to get out of bed.

Anyway, I got started doing skips, lateral shuffles, backward skips and some other drills with the team. Then we did our strides and Spencer told us we were doing the hill up to the exit at 72nd street, which resulted in an audible groan from the group and with folks asking where that hill is.

I remembered that particular hill quite well actually. Last year it was the first hill we did repeats on at the beginning of the marathon program. At that time I was probably 10-15 lbs heavier than I am now and way slower! In fact, when we got to the hill I couldn't even believe how short and not steep it was. Spencer assigned the intermediate group 40 minutes--the first 20 at 85% and the second at 90%. Surprisingly, I felt awesome and strong for pretty much the whole time--which is a big deal given how much I HATE hills. Here's my garmin log entry from today.

TT Hill Workout 9/23/11 by kelila83 at Garmin Connect - Details

For those of you who don't feel like clicking the link, basically for the first 20 minutes, I ran up the hill between an 8:12-8:30 pace and then coasted down at a 9:30-10 pace. For the second 20 minutes, I ran up the hill at between a 7:14- 8:03 pace and coasted down at a 9:30-10 pace. In total I averaged a 9:07 pace for the workout.

Now, what makes this super impressive is looking at my same workout on that hill from 2010.

TT Hill Workout 7/30/10 by kelila83 at Garmin Connect - Details

Granted, this was the first hill workout I had ever done in life. Unfortunately, I hadn't figured out at that point that I should hit the lap button when I got to the top and bottom of the hills to keep track of my up vs downhill splits. But, that time I did 30 min and my average pace was 10:09 and my FASTEST pace for the entire workout was 7:51. What a change!!

Today's workout (and my post-workout evaluation) definitely inspired me to keep working hard!