A Fantastic Workout on the Indoor Track

Sunday is starting to be speed work day.  In running there seems to be two ways to do speed work.  The first is on a trail or normal run, where the speed intervals are determined by time.  (Run a faster pace for 30 seconds, etc.).  The second and perhaps more common method of speed work is on a track where the speed intervals are determined by distance around the track (200m, 400m, etc.)

I wasn't feeling an outdoor workout since it was two billion percent humidity so I headed to the gym and the indoor track.  I'd wanted to do some shorter intervals faster thanks to a couple posts I read over at Steve in A Speedo where he talked about training for a road mile.  It said it was a good way to improve foot turnover and looked worth trying out. 

Workout: 

• 1 mile warm up
• 1 lap running at 9:00/mile
• 1/2 lap jogging
• 1 lap running at 9:00/mile
• 1/2 lap walking
• Repeat run/jog/run/walk eight times

The total distance of the workout was 1 mile warmup + 4 miles of run/jog/run/walk.  Looking at the graph, the walking got really slow at the end.  At first I thought 9:00/mile was not going to be challenging enough.  I kept it going until the final mile and then it got really hard to hold that pace.  I figure I must've picked right.  It's kind of obvious looking at the pace chart below that the final 2 intervals fell off a bit. Sigh. 

If I do this workout again, I'll either try to keep the 9:00/mile pace for a longer mileage workout, or shorten the miles and pick up the pace to an 8:00/mile pace or some pace.  8:00/mile is idea becuase it can easily be divided into both 6 and 4.  There's four points on the track where I was looking at the clock.  On my track a 9:00 mile translates into a 90 second lap.  90 seconds doesn't divide by 4, so I figured 88 seconds per lap, or 22 seconds per quarter lap.  I was doing math the whole way round the track for the entire workout.  An 8:00 mile is 80 seconds per lap or 20 seconds per quarter lap.  Would that make things easier or harder?