I’ve been interested in High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, for a couple years now, ever since I read Martin Gibala’s book “The One Minute Workout” (it’s really a 10 minute workout, but the book is great, I highly recommend it).

I haven’t been doing it consistently though. One reason was because I wasn’t sure how to incorporate it into training for longer distances like the half marathon. Since it was my first one, I decided to stick with the basics.

But right now I’m not signed up for any future races, and I have some time to work on other things, like my speed.

So I turned back to HIIT. I am blessed to have a couple of other women to run with, which has been wonderful for accountability.* Not just for getting out there, because I was pretty good about that, at least on nice days, 😉 but I’m really thankful for the push to try harder once I’m out there.

We’ve been doing a workout from Gibala’s book called “Basic Training” which is basically 3 minutes of running hard, and then 3 minutes of walking, for about half an hour (but one of my running companions decided we should increase the workout so we were covering a whole 5K).

The first couple hard intervals aren’t that bad, but I usually end up walking about halfway through the last few.

However, last monday I ran ALL of them!!! It was a great feeling. 🙂 I think part of it was that I paced myself better and didn’t go so all out in the beginning, but I hope that in time it will lead to real gains in fitness and speed.

Stay tuned to find out 😉

(We also recently found a track at a local high school and timed ourselves running a mile. We each did it at our own pace, and we plan to retry it after a month or so to see how our times have changed after all this training.)

*If you don’t have anyone to run with, I encourage you to try what I did and take advantage of one of the many local neighborhood groups that are springing up online. I used an off-shoot of our Buy Nothing group on Facebook, but you could also try NextDoor, et cetera. 🙂