Failure/Success

This morning I tried doing my usual 3 mile workout as a tempo walk. As I understand it a tempo workout is done at the same effort throughout. Using my heartrate table I see that I should be doing the tempo workout at 172 bpm. After some warm up exercises I started out fast at about 150 bpm. Around half-mile I was only up to 160 bpm and wondering if I could continue this for 3 miles. Approaching the mile mark I was finally up to 170 bpm and fealt like I was falling apart so I stopped the workout at mile one.

So I failed to do my tempo walk, but surprised myself when I checked the time:

11:15 - New PR by 25 seconds!

After a short rest I was thinking about doing another mile so I took off, this time starting much faster and got my heart rate up to 170 in the first 200 meters. However, I didn't feel that I could keep this up for the entire mile so I stopped before injuring myself and went home to do some stretching.

I'll research how to do tempo and interval workouts before trying it again. It looks like I should probably start with shorter distances and work my way up. Doing three miles at 172 bpm was too much at my current fitness level.