150m Interval Sprints and Flirting with Crossfit Endurance

Location: A grass verge, London
Date: 24nd February

Warm up:10 minute jog to find some grass
Workout: 5 x 150m sprint (25 - 30 seconds each) - between 2 and 2.5 minutes rest between
Warm down: jog back

Total Time: 23 minutes

Post-Workout Nutrition: none required, since this was still sloshing around my stomach. Fasting until dinner today!

I was away from home in a hotel this morning so I had to jog until I found a grass verge long enough to use that for the sprinting. The knee is feeling good and I'm getting to grips with the forefoot-first style of both running and sprinting... but I saw no reason to tempt fate by slamming it with sprint intervals on the cruel London pavements.

I am flirting with Crossfit Endurance, after it was mentioned by Benjamin in this exchange of thoughts on a post last week, and I took a brief look around the site. It switched me onto was the idea of trying short distance intervals from which I emerge reasonably fresh. Previously, I have approached every sprint session with a Tabata-like mindset, determined each time to emulate the experience of being pursued by a tiger and running for my life.

The idea of Crossfit Endurance is to train for endurance events without putting in the many hours traditionally assumed to be necessary. In a way this is what I have been doing, in an uninformed way, with my occasional long fell races interspersed with HIT-style cardio and weight training.

What I took away from my brief read of the CFE site was that intervals of slightly longer distances are also worth considering. This got me thinking that if I want to do these things more often - as might be necessary to follow the CFE approach - I should consider emerging from sessions less fatigued. After all, not every animal we got chased by was a tiger, and even when it was a tiger, we would not have been running for our lives each time. The tiger might sometimes have been a long way off, so we'd have fled only at the pace required to comfortably escape.

Don't get me wrong - the final interval hurt - but the effort was relaxed and controlled, and I constantly tweaked the rest time and effort level to avoid 'leg jelly'.