Interval Running with Lance Armstrong

I went out this afternoon for a run and decided to see if Lance Armstrong would mind joining me and doing some coaching as I went. He was ready and willing, thanks to my iPod and the Nike+ "Lance Armstrong: Run Faster" workout. The workout is one I bought a while back when I first started running and using the Nike+ system. It actually comes with one mp3 that is a little over 40 minutes long and then the individual songs used during the workout are included also.

The one long mp3 has Lance coming in and giving instructions on the warm up and the intervals. It starts with about an 8 minute long warm up, then goes into a series of 4 minute intervals. You do 4 minutes fast - 80% of race pace Lance says - then 4 minutes of slower/recovery. For the faster part, Lance instructs, "Run at a pace where you could not hold a conversation." You do this four times, for a total of 32 minutes - 4 fast, 4 slow, so 8 minutes times 4. At the end there is a minute or two of cool down and good job remarks.

The music mix is pretty good. It doesn't play the full songs, but rather plays portions of two faster beat per minute songs followed by portions of two slower songs. A couple of the faster songs have a beat that matches my steps perfectly for me to push it and and keep time to the beat. That part is fun and motivating.

When I first got into running regularly in the spring of 2008, I used this workout several times. I credit this with lowering my average pace from about 8:30-8:45 to closer to 8 minutes per mile. Lance says that "doing this workout as part of your regular routine will make you a mile eating machine." I agree with this too. I became comfortable going 6 and 7 plus miles on my runs instead of just 4 or so.

Using my Garmin Forerunner 305 allowed me to see the intervals on a graph and I could see where my pace and heart rate rose and fell accordingly. In early runs, my pace would go up to about 7:30-7:45 during the interval and down to 8:20-8:30 on recovery. Tonight, almost two years later, my pace on the push was around and sometimes under 7 minutes per mile and the recovery pace was about 8 minutes per mile. I felt this was pretty good considering also that the route I took is not completely flat. Both pushing and recovering had some ups and downs.

This was the first time I had used it in a while. I may try to do it more regularly to see what it does. Someday I want to try some intervals on a track too.