Lots of talk over at dailymile.com right now about the Garmin Virtual Partner and Garmin Custom/Advanced Workouts (partly my fault for keep mentioning it I suppose….) Hence tonight’s workout of the Garmin Custom variety:
To set up one of these workouts, you’ll need to open up your Garmin Training Center software and add the various “steps” of the workout. Mine was fairly straightforward and contained just three “steps”:
1. 2 miles @ any pace
2. 4 miles @ 6:30 pace
3. 2 miles @ any pace.
I could have specified an easy pace for steps 1 and 2, but I quite fancied the freedom of running at any pace. Of course Step 2 was the important piece of the puzzle.
Anyway, the run in my older Newton Gravitas was tremendous – the 2 mile warm up was completed at 7:46 pace and without relying on the Garmin for pacing, I averaged 6:29 per mile for the 4 mile tempo section of the run. I backed off in the last two miles but still averaged less than 7 minute mile pace.
Very enjoyable run. Loved the Garmin countdown to each segment of the workout and the little jingle at the end to signify “workout over”. Mission accomplished…