Blazing Speed!

Yesterday's Total Calorie Intake: 1923

This morning was a 7 mile run - and I've been using my mid-week "longer" run to do speedwork. So I did a 7 interval Yasso 800s workout.

I went to the gym since it was dark, cold and windy this morning - I did not want to go to the track in those conditions. There's one problem with doing this workout at the gym - the treadmills there have a 60 minute time limit and this workout was going to be taking me about 10 minutes more than that. Luckily I had thought about this upfront - I thought it would be better to "stop and reset" towards the beginning instead of at the end - so after the first interval I stopped the treadmill and re-started it.

When I started my initial jog, my heart rate was pretty low so I kept on bringing the pace up. I settled in at 5.5 mph - a tad under an 11 min mile - for my recovery jogs. I also found that I had better success today on the intervals - I was running them in the 7.1 to 7.2 mph range (a few weeks ago I was around 6.8)...my HR did not rise above 170 until midway through the third interval, so I knew I was not overdoing it. I'm wondering if the bump-up in calories over the past few days is part of the reason I ran so comfortably...I'm thinking that my body may not have had enough fuel during the past few weeks.

My 800 splits this morning were: 4:11, 4:11, 4:11, 4:11, 4:12, 4:14, 4:09. I finished off the entire 7 mile workout in 1:07:52 - a 9:52/mile average pace. Wow! 3 years ago I ran a 10Ks race at this pace (with an average HR of 181) and now it's my pace for a mid-week speed workout (average HR 158)!

Now I have a big predicament today: since I burned around 900 calories with this run, I have close to 3,000 calories to eat to stay fueled up. How can I do that without adding too much junk food or "empty calories". It's very ironic - I started out the year trying to limit my net calorie intake to 1600 per day and today I have to eat twice that amount (OK...I'll only net 400 calories more, but still - that's a lot of food!) This should be interesting...

This morning I listened to a bunch of music from the past decade (or so...a few albums are a little more than 10 years old) a lot if it "alternative" type music including The Plain White Ts, Fastball, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Train, KT Tunstall, Green Day, Oasis and Daughtry.