This weeks sessions ended up all being done on the gym treadmill. I had hoped to do a bonus fourth session this morning but a late start and busy day got in the way of that which means no Garmin splits. The week 2 program is a step up from week 1 with the intervals going from 60 seconds to 90 and the rest going from 90 to 2 minutes, repeated for 20 minutes (although it doesn’t quite add up as the last rest period takes you to 21 minutes.) The total duration of the six 90s run intervals is 9 minutes, merely a minute longer than week 1 which is good for beginners as it helps their body to adjust. I felt it wasn’t quite enough for me and with that annoying discrepancy in the time, I ended up adding an extra 90s interval to the program and a 2.5 minute cooldown to round off the workout at 30 minutes.

Buoyed by my speed at the end of last week, during the w2d1 session, I gradually increased my pace on the treadmill to gauge how fast I could comfortably go. For the second two sessions, I pushed at a satisfactory 6:30 min/mi pace for the intervals. It will be interesting next week to see if I can keep this pace up for the 3 minute intervals. Even though I’m using C25K to help me work towards running a 5km at 7 min/mi, I’m using a faster pace for the shorter intervals, loosely derived from the pacing tables provided by the FIRST program. (You can read more about FIRST here and I do recommend their book, “Run Less, Run Faster“). As the C25K intervals increase in time, the pace will get a little slower.

Still, two weeks in and it’s all going well.