Speed Work with the Southern Cal Walkers

Whohoo--did some speed work today at Cal Tech with the Southern Cal Walkers. 800 meter repeats, here's how it went:

1st 800 meter time - 4:55
2nd 800 meter time - 5:28
3rd 800 meter time - 5:22

The fastest was about a 9:50 min/mile pace and the slowest was about a 10:56 min/mile pace. I don't think I could do a whole mile at the fastest pace, but the second repeat was feeling like my 12 min/mile long walk speed yet I was over a minute per mile faster. The last repeat I was concentrating more on form and was a little faster with about the same effort.

Of course we did a full set of warm up drills before and stretched afterwards.

Now I'm convinced that the course I marked around the block is way off so my weekend project will be to measure it. Maybe sometime in the future I'll get a GPS system like the one of the Garmin Forerunner systems, but for now I'll do it the "official" cheapskate method by counting revolutions of a bicycle wheel.