Achievement Unlocked: Speed Demon

Yesterday I went tot he gym before I was supposed to go to Professional Development.  I had just done all three of my new program days during the long weekend and so I figured that I would focus on cardio.  Plan A was to run the beep test, and then bike.  Plan B was to do sprints and then bike and then do more sprints, and plan C was just plain old run and bike. 

I ended up going with Plan B.  I got on a treadmill and set it to 11mph and did 30 seconds on 20 seconds off sprinting.  By the time I had done ten 30 second sprints I felt like 11 was not fast enough and bumped it up to 12mph.  During my 11th sprint the treadmill crapped out and started to slow down on me.  Ugh.

So I got off of there and biked for 5k.  For me this is a good way to keep the cardio going while my heart rate drops back down a little bit.  Since there were lots of people at the gym I figured that I shouldn’t test my luck and just run a straight 5k on the treadmill instead of sprints again.

I got on the machine and set it to go at 9mph.   I trucked along there for a bit and figured that I would be close to being under 20 minutes at that pace but I might just have to punch it up a few notches.  So after about 2k I went to 9.2mph and then a little later 9.5 and for the last 400 meters I was going to run at 10mph.  I had less than half a lap to go when the machine outright died on me.  All the lights off again.

Crap!

So I quickly remembered to stop my stopwatch, cleaned off that treadmill, got on another, let it spin up to 10mph and then finished the 5k.  I did get a bit of a break, but considering I was less than 30 seconds away from the finish, I have no doubts that I would have done so at that pace just fine.  I probably lost a few seconds actually due to the whole treadmill dying fiasco.  And so, for the second time, I finished 5k in less than 20 minutes.

19:52

Pretty Sweet!