Getting faster.

Oh, speedwork. I like making you one word, and I like doing you in interval fashion. Tempo runs and mile-repeats are a little tougher. BUT. I accomplished mile-repeats on Monday night, and I'm looking forward to a tempo run next week.

My Smart Coach (haha - Runner's World's Smart Coach program) is set up for the Cleveland race, but I don't really have a goal for that race (hoping to just run with someone from the group and help them when it gets tough). So I'm not following the plan except for the speedwork. Mileage and paces are more up in the air. Monday night, I set out to do mile-repeats, mostly because I hadn't done any speedwork since before Athens and it seemed harder than a tempo run. The plan called for this:

1 mile warmup
1 mile at 9:08
.5 mile recovery
1 mile at 9:08
.5 mile recovery
1 mile at 9:08
1 mile cooldown

But I screwed it up a bit since I was using my watch to tell me when to speed up or slow down. So in the middle of a mile-repeat, it beeped to slow down. I haven't really looked into what I did wrong, but that's okay - I'm happy with what I ended up with:

1 mile warmup (10:15 pace)
1 mile at 8:55
.5 at 12:22 pace (walked for a bit)
1 mile at 10:28 (I think that's half a mile-repeat and half a recovery - wtf?!)
.5 at 9:01 pace (confused when it beeped to slow down)
1 mile at 9:06 pace (just pushed through to make this a mile-repeat)
.5 recovery at 11:12 pace (little walking)
another .5 for cooldown at 9:52 pace to finish up

Kinda makes me sad that I didn't listen to my watch correctly. It appears that I did set it up right -- I just got ahead of myself. As embarrassing as it is, I think the way I did my run -- started at the trail with a mile south and then turned around to finish the run going north -- messed me up. I had mile markers in my head that weren't accurate for the run I was doing. Oh well. I still did 6 in just under an hour, and I did hit my paces for the mile-repeats, generally.

And to follow up that run, last night I hit the Brecksville Reservation hill again. Last time, I took a walk break; this time I ran up the entire thing. 4 miles in 40 minutes with mile 2 at 10:47 (two weeks ago, mile 2 was 11:18). I love this hill -- sucks while doing it, but it's tough enough that I feel like 4 miles is totally acceptable.

In other news, I use way too many dashes.