I was reminded last night that I’d not done any speed work for a while… so I took the opportunity at lunchtime to go on the walking machine.
I’ve already given up on the idiosyncrasies of the in-built programming, so I opted for a set of manually adjusted intervals, based around the visual 400m track that appears on screen.
I warmed up at 4mph for 400m, lap 1, then ran at 6mph or 6.5mph for all the even laps, whilst incrementally increasing the speed on the odd laps. For example, lap 3 consisted of 200m of 7mph and 200m of 7.5mph. The penultimate odd lap was run at 9.5mph and 10mph, the final just at 10mph.
I then cooled down on lap 15, slowly going down from 5mph to 3mph.
Overall I managed 3.48 miles in the 30 minute (pre-cool-down) session, which is an average of just under 7mph.
By the by, it is my understanding that someone, who will remain nameless other than to let on that he lives in Brighton, went out for a quick run yesterday and got so lost that they ended up in Eastbourne of all places. This 5 hour detour took him 26 miles and he was forced to catch a bus home, DUH… not the kind of person you should ever trust with your navigation, methinks! Come to think of it though, this is not actually a bad marathon time bearing in mind he went over all the hills en route.