Mile Repeats???

Every week I head to the track on Monday night for Rush Hour.  Rush Hour is the weekly track workout put on by Mike Rush of Rush Running.  It is a free, coached workout and attracts anywhere from 20 runners in the freezing cold winter months to 80 plus during peak training season.  The fun part of the night is finding out what crazy, pain-inducing workout Mike has dreamed up for us.

Tonight our workout was extra special.  It started as we are going to do mile repeats with 2 minutes rest between intervals.   Okay, that doesn't sound too bad.  Oh, but then it got better...we just had to wait for Mike to get to the good part.  We didn't get to start the rest when we finished the mile...nope, we got to immediately start a 400m interval.  The miles were to be done at something slightly faster than 10K pace and then the 400m would be at mile pace.  The group was assigned three repeats of this interval unless you were new and got to do a modified workout. 

My awesome running partner Anne and I decided to go for a 9:45 pace for our mile repeat.  We were aiming for 2:20-2:25 per quarter.  We wanted to aim for something under a 9:00 pace for the 400m interval.  Our times were actually pretty good throughout the workout.  We struggled a little on the very last 400m but otherwise did okay.  Our miles were 9:40, 9:48, and 9:51 and our 400m were 2:15, 2:08, 2:15? We didn't quite hit mile pace but we were at or under 5K pace which was good.  The big accomplishment was that we did the workout as it was assigned...normally I am a horrible influence on Anne and talk her into modifying the workout.  I ended up with about 6 1/2 miles between the warm up/cool down and the workout.