Fear, Intervals and Visualizing the Run

Fear is often the biggest motivator. Intervals often scare me but it is an integral pillar of every running program. The idea of intervals is to teach your body that it can run faster by running it faster. And the way to run it faster is to run shorter distances at a faster pace. The advantage of intervals is that it helps in supplying oxygen to your muscles which means that you will run faster and longer. The pace at which you run intervals is usually the pace at which your muscles get sore (building lactic acid) and it needs to be understood that you will not be able to run at the interval pace for a long long time/ distance.

For 10k races, you do an intervals between 400 mts and 2kms typically. You start off with a good warm up and some dynamic stretching. Warm-up is the key. I spend typically about 15 minutes warming up before doing intervals. Also, attempt to run the first interval at the same pace that you would run your last interval in and get your rest between two intervals. It is also important that you control your

I missed my run this morning despite waking up at 5 am. Even after spending about half hour hanging out, it was hard to visualize two km in 8 minutes and repeating that 4 times over. Then it was time to visualize where to run. Cubbon park seemed too far away and Ulsoor looked too crowded. I just decided to clean the house a little bit and do some veggie shopping. Definitely need to do intervals tomorrow.