I never knew Texas was larger than Alaska.  You learn something new every day!

3 easy miles this morning on global running day.  My legs still feel dead from back to back hard days on Sunday and Monday, so I took a few walk breaks to enjoy the nice 55 degree weather and cool breeze on the lake front.  It was a lovely morning!

Re: Not doing intervals on a measured course or track...Does your watch respond fast enough to get an accurate pace? I know my current one does not. Oh maybe your just timing .25 on the watch...that just dawned on me...do they have a button for that?

When my workouts are not pre-programmed, I hit the lap button at a known distance. When I am running on an unmarked course, I use the distance on my watch and hit the lap button at .12, .24 or .25.

As far as hitting paces on 200s and 400s, your splits tell you your pace. So based on your 5k PR of 18:30, your 200m split is 40 seconds (5:21 pace), and your 400m split is 1:22 (5:29 pace) for "R" pace intervals. Where the pace given by your watch can vary +/- X%, your split is the true value. So it is important that you hit your splits because at 200 meters, a second or two can affect the pace you are trying to run greatly, e.g., 41 seconds is a 5:29 pace and 42 seconds is a 5:38 pace. While this may seem inconsequential, if you're running at a 5:38 pace for your workout, you're not training at your designated training pace. So it is imperative to know what your target splits are so that you can adjust them accordingly until you get it dialed in over the course of the workout.

Similarly, 400m intervals are also run by splits instead of pace. So your target of 1:22 (5:29 pace) becomes a 5:33 pace at 1:23, and 5:38 at 1:24. In the grand scheme of things, does this matter? YES. But not obsessively so. Over the course of your 12 x 400 workout, you'll want to start hitting 1:22s about the 3rd or fourth rep, then hit them consistently for the duration of the workout.

When splits are your guide, it allows you to focus on how you feel, what your arms are doing and the timing of your footfalls instead of constantly staring at your watch. This is how you learn how to run by effort, and once you learn that, then the splits become less important because fatigue, elevation weather or some other factor might be affecting your ability to hit your splits, so you can take that into account and call it good like onemile, Cy and the others opined. 👍

Up at 5 a.m. this morning and off to the Thousand Oaks YMCA to get in a run/walk. When I started, my brain was like: "it's too humid and I feel blah..are we really doing this?" By the end of mile 1 was feeling okay; by Mile 2, feeling darn good; and ended up strongly running my last 1.5 miles nonstop. This is the way my morning runs usually go, lol, sluggish bit of start, and acting like a spoiled brat ("I don't wanna, I don't wanna!" ) then feeling better, and then nice strong finish. Ended up today with 3.6 miles done.

Even I know where Alaska and Hawaii are

Yesterday during my run I got dive bombed by a red winged blackbird. Claws in my hair and I knocked my visor off swinging my arms around to chase him off. So as I was going to get it and put it back on my head the bird(s) kept trying to swoop down on me until I finally just ran away.  . This morning I was afraid to run past them so I stayed on the other side of the road and managed to not get attacked.

Same bird swooped down on me last year and I dropped my mp3 player. As I was cowering under shelter deciding what to do, someone drove over it and flattened it like a pancake, crunch! 

Aside from wearing a red singlet, I don't even know what I did to that stupid ass bird.

Yesterday during my run I got dive bombed by a red winged blackbird. Claws in my hair and I knocked my visor off swinging my arms around to chase him off. So as I was going to get it and put it back on my head the bird(s) kept trying to swoop down on me until I finally just ran away.  . This morning I was afraid to run past them so I stayed on the other side of the road and managed to not get attacked.

Yikes!  This just gave me flashbacks of watching the Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I saw that probably 35 years ago.

Thanks LRB. Yeah i get all that. I just never knew that watches had a “lap” button. My Tomtom really stinks. I use a timex currently for all my intervals. I did just order a Garmin 230 this am. 

You do know you can change the TomTom to manual laps, RIGHT?  And that TomTom has laps (not a button but by pressing your fingers atop the screen)?  At least when doing intervals you can do them manually like I do on the TM.