Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Need for Speed

I've known for a while that the only way to be a faster walker is to practice walking faster. (Paraphrasing Dave McGovern.) I also know that if you do the exact same workouts every day, you will never get stronger. Knowing and doing are two different things.

Today I started doing speed workouts and plan to continue doing them once a week as part of my regular workouts.

Getting my shin muscles properly warmed up has been a problem lately, so I did a mile at a SLOW 15:45 pace with good racewalking form to try to warm up. The sprints were 1/4 mile and I did 6 reps with 2 or 3 min rests in between, depending on how my shins felt, with a half-mile cool down. My sprint times were: 3:18, 3:26, 3:22, 3:13, 3:15, 3:29 with 7:26 for the last half mile.

Despite the warm up, my shins were still tight during every sprint. During my slower times, I even felt pretty stiff as if it was an effort to get my legs to go that fast. I stretched pretty good when I finished and will stretch a few more times over the next day or so. (My shins really need it!)

OK, it is only wishful thinking, but if I were to walk an entire mile as fast as my fastest 1/4 mile sprint, we're talking a 13-min mile! I know the speed workouts will work, and I'm sure I'll be there someday soon.

3 comments:

Nyle said...

Keep it up. Speed work is the hardest of all the trainings. We go to the track and do either Pyrimads or 1km reps. But I do know it works...it just hurts so much while doing it.

malvs2walk said...

Good for you, Cindi, getting out there and getting started. Yes, the only way to learn to walk faster is to walk faster. I keep telling myself the same thing!

Cindi said...

Thanks for the encouragement!