I am sure you have read about the benefits of doing both tempo and interval runs. Intervals work your heart by increasing your heart rate for sprints and then recovering with cool downs, then repeat. Tempos strengthen your stamina by getting your heart, body and mind used to increased effort over an extended period of time. But which to do? Which is better? The answer of course is do both, preferably with a recovery day in between. All fine and dandy if you have three days! So my new answer is to combien the two (absolutely no scientific basis for this!) getting the benefit of 72 hours of running combined into a one hour run!

Like I said, I have no scientific basis for the benefits of doing a tempo interval and in fact I have only done it once on my run today. But buy my new book and workout plan today and become the runner that wins gold in the Olympics! Only $19.99 comes with a water bottle and free iphone/android ap that doesn’t work.

But seriously that today I ran a tempo/interval run. I did about a mile of block long intervals sandwiched by two sort tempo runs, and I did it all under 10 min miles. It felt pretty good, definitely feels like more effort than a normal run of equal distance. I think I’ll do it again at some point. The block long intervals were a bit longer than my normal interval trac workout (straights and curves) and it was a bit of an effort to keep up the sprint for the full blocks (longer blocks than normal too!) I did them along the reedway park strip, next time I think I’ll go back as well.