800 Intervals

I thought I hit all my target times this morning but the trusty (???)
Garmin indicates otherwise.

I was surprised to wake up at 4:15 this morning after travelling back
from Vegas yesterday and going to bed around 10:30. But I was awake
and began running at 4:30. It was cool this morning ... not too cool
but close. I need to look into getting some tights for the upcoming
change in season. I think I'll need them in Utah for the Thanksgiving
5-miler too.

The schedule called for:

1 mile warm up
4 x 800 @ 3:07 (with 2 minute rest interval)
10 minute cool down

I ended up with:

1.5 mile warm up (I took Louetta straight to the high school track since there was very little traffic. I would never try this at any other time of day!)

3:13
3:03
3:05
3:07

2.0 mile cool down

I'm surprised the Garmin has 3:13 for the time of the first 800. When running intervals, I've adapted an approach wherein I wear my Garmin to track the workout. On my right wrist, I wear my Ironman. I set it for a repeating timer with an alarm for desired split times. This allows me to know how I'm doing while running the interval. This morning I set the alarm for 1:33 which is what I wanted each 400 of the 800 to be. I would know by where I was on the track when the alarm sounded if I was ahead of or behind "schedule". By the Ironman, I thought I hit the first interval right on. The Garmin obviously disagrees with me on that point.

I did focus on not starting out too fast. With last week's intervals, I hit my target time for the first one but didn't get down to it again ... every one was slower. Today I wanted the first 800 to be a little slow or right on 3:07 at the fastest. I was hoping to conserve energy for the later 800's. This approach seemed to work well for me today as evidenced by my subsequent times. It's no secret that I get too giddy at the beginning of my runs and waste a bunch of energy going too fast, too early. I'm going to work on getting away from that approach since I think it's counterproductive.

I also decided that I'm going to count Monday's run in Las Vegas as my tempo run this week. I know the time wasn't as fast as the tempo run was supposed to be and the distance was further. But that run was in the neighborhood of what I was supposed to run and I don't think I'll have a chance to "catch up" and still get the proper between-workout rest.

I've got 15 on the schedule for Saturday.