I have mentioned on many occasions, that it is important to go hard during workouts that are supposed to be hard.  A lot of my hard workouts are done in the pool or on my bike.  Today however, it was my run that included a series of very hard, high intensity intervals.

The run was an hour long in total.  Within that hour, I had a series of fast pace intervals.  The goal was to run these intervals, at an effort of greater than 90%.  In other words, I needed to run very hard during the intervals.

The workout went like this:

• Easy paced warm up for 20 minutes
• 3 Minutes at >90% effort, then 2 minutes recovery
• 2 Minutes at >90% effort, then 1 minute recovery
• 1 Minute at >90% effort then, 1 minute recovery (x3)
• Easy paced cool down, to make up the rest of the hour.

The main set represented a total of 8 minutes running at very high effort, with only 5 minutes of total recovery.  This set is designed to get my heart rate up very high, and you can see that happening in the photograph above.

I really enjoyed this workout.  It was fun to run really fast.  In contrast, my next run is a two hour long run, this weekend.  My instructions for that workout are … “I cant stress to you how easy I want you to make this run”.

So once again, the goal is to go hard in workouts with high intensity intervals, and on your easy runs, go really, really, easy.