On my schedule for tonight was ’40 minutes run, either interval or Kara Goucher’. ‘Interval’ and ‘Kara Goucher’ being what I call two of my Nike+ workouts downloaded from iTunes. The Interval workout is actually ‘Increase Your Speed I’, narrated by none other than Alberto Salazar…

For those of you who are normal, Alberto Salazar is a very famous running coach. Chris always needs to remind me that runners or coaches who I think are famous are really people no one has ever heard of. Me? Huge fan of Kara Goucher. Chris says ‘who’? (Kara Goucher, of course, is the narrator of my other 40 minute workout).

Workout goes like this:

10 min warm-up, 4 minutes @ 60% of your maximum effort, 4 minutes recovery, 3 minutes @ 70% of your maximum effort, 3 minutes  recovery, 2 minutes @ 80% of your max effort, 2 minutes recovery, 1 minute @ 90 – 95% of your maximum effort, 10 minutes cool down. A total of 40 minutes.

It’s tough, don’t get me wrong. But the toughest time is the first. Or the second. After that, you get into the swing of how the workout works and makes you feel. I concentrated very hard today on making sure that my warm-up was slow and deliberate, not overdoing it before my intervals.

I don’t know how well I did on most of the intervals – during the 3 minute section I actually forgot I was supposed to be going fast. Ooops! But it was only for a few seconds. Let me tell you though, that 1 minute section was mine tonight. I owned it. I had people turning their heads at the gym watching me soar around them on the 1/12 of a mile track. Okay, maybe that was just my imagination. But that’s how fast I felt like I was going!