Garmin 210 - trouble keeping track on the track

A shot of the track from this morning

Today's workout (track): 8 x 400's plus 3 mile run

Since I'm racing again next Sunday, I wanted to get in a little speed work before I taper my training next week. This morning I headed over to the local high school track to run some intervals. There were a handful of runners and walkers already on the track when I arrived but the lanes were fairly clear. I brought a stopwatch as well as my Garmin and I ended up using the FR 210 to record my runs and used the stopwatch to time my rest periods between intervals.

I didn't run the intervals hard. My goal was to do mile-equivalents a little faster than my 5K race PR and I managed to average 8:06 across eight quarter miles. I hoped that would recruit enough fast twitch fibers to give me some speed when I ran the following three miles (5K actually) and it did. I averaged 8:45 for that run.

A clear margin of error

The Garmin did not do a good job capturing my route. The picture above is a grab from Google Earth using the imported KMZ file. I stayed primarily in a middle lane but the GPS interpreted that much differently. Even though the 210 is always a little off I still like it a lot. It's great to be able to run without swapping the foot pod every time I change shoes. Especially in the case of the Hattori's that don't even have a place to attach a foot pod.

I'm really happy with today's workout. While I'm still not speedy, I've proven to myself that I can run sub-9:00 paces when I need to. The Hattori's were interesting to use on the track and they responded well when I took off in a sprint to begin each interval. I haven't decided what I'll do for tomorrow's Memorial Day workout but I am hoping to fold in a bike ride or two before I return to the office.

Gearing up for a 5K race

I am planning to run in a 5K race in May that is part of a larger set of races that include a marathon, half marathon, 10K, 1 mile and kids run. A friend of mine who has been running for a couple of years will be joining me. I'm confident that I'll be able to run a credible pace for 5K by then but I do need to work on both speed and endurance. I'm going to try to run a 5K course this weekend as a way of training for the upcoming race. I use Google Earth, Gmaps and MapMyRun to plan my routes. They are all very accurate (to the inch) so you can plan ahead or track where you ran against your elapsed time to calculate your pace.