This notebook contains a log of intervals I ran on the treadmill during the summer of 2024. My goal at the time was to fight for as much aerobic capacity as possible before returning to the 2024 Pike’s Peak Marathon.

In the plot below, each dot represents one continuous effort. Workouts with more than one interval comprise multiple dots; single continuous efforts are a single dot. The red dot is the workout calculator which prescribes a pace as a function of distance.

It’s important to note that, whether because of calibration, air resistance, or a combination of factors, the treadmills at the gym seem to report about twenty seconds per mile faster than they feel, so that you should interpret the splits accordingly. However, the paces feel perfectly consistent, so that from workout to workout, picking a point on the Pareto front consistently means I’m able to finish a workout, but only just barely.

How did this turn out? I got progressively more comfortable at the pace and pushed the frontier into territory that didn’t previously feel accessible. It felt like the most effective training tool I’d used in years. I tried to exercise caution, never engaging in a workout without at least one to two days rest between workouts. But I ultimately gameified it too hard and got injured after a few months. So take this as a training idea with a warning attached. No regrets.

Logged intervals

Workout Calculator

Stats