Intervals

Interval training is supposed to help your speed. You'll see lots of marathoners and half-marathoners do track workouts to work on their form, as well as their speed. And it definitely helps. It's always better to run with a group, and if you can find one that's convenient and at your level, it's ideal. I'm not so lucky. I work out at 5am, before work, and before most people are up. And I'm usually done in 60-90 minutes.

I'm still recovering from an achilles injury, so although I'm doing intervals on TU and TH, I'm still taking it slow. On TU, I do more intense intervals in between warming up and cooling down. On TH, I do easy intervals after a longer run. And while it's still early in my training, I'm ramping up slowly. I let my ankle decide how intense my intervals are. And of course, I stretch very well before and after.

One thing to note is that you should be very careful when running your hardest intervals. You should reserve that "all out sprint" for very rare occasions, or just don't use it at all. Pulled hamstrings and other tweaky injuries happen when you go all out. Hold a little bit back, even for the short intervals, work on your form, try to be efficient, try to be faster with an easy breath and pace, try to control your heart rate by breathing deeply. And most of all, don't worry too much about your day-to-day performance. Just run.

The bottom line is that it's good to mix up the types of runs that you do. It makes it more dynamic and gives you different ideas and areas to focus on. Give it a shot. Go to a track (nice, flat, and soft!) and add some simple intervals to your normal runs.