Sub-6 before 6

3 mile w/u
Target: 5x3 mins. w/2 mins. rest; 5x2 mins. w/1 min. rest; 5x1 min. w/30 secs. rest
Actual: Above
~2 mile c/d
Total: 11.5-12 miles

In my opinion, there is no reason to ever get up at 5am. The one exception might be if you have to catch an early morning flight (which I will be doing next week) or perhaps want to snag some killer deals at a Saturday morning garage sale. Today, however, waking up before the rooster was an absolute necessity due to the rigors of the sales meeting. The fact that Jordan and I were at the office preparing for said sales meeting until almost 11 the previous evening didn't exactly make this any easier, but when there simply isn't another option the excuses tend to run out pretty quickly.

And so, the crack of 5:30 found Jordan and I strapping on our nerd laps and begrudgingly lacing up our shoes for what promised to be a decidedly lackluster workout. Fortunately, either by incredibly shrewd planning or sheer coincidence, Jordan had written up a fairly low-key, effort based workout that I was confident I could tackle. Since the Neck seemed to be the most sensible location, I knew the pace would largely be at the mercy of the wind and rolling terrain (and the ungodly hour), so my plan was simply to tuck in behind Jordan and not stress about the speed of each interval. Based on his feedback and verbal encouragement, I'm pretty sure it was more or less a success. I do know that my first few 3-minute intervals were at 3:38/k pace (thanks to the handy dandy new conversion chart on Jordan's blog, I can tell you that 3:44 is 6:00 pace, so this would put these around 5:50 pace) and I'm fairly certain the shorter intervals were all faster than that despite the abbreviated rest. Any time I can hit sub-6 pace before 6am is considered a win in my book, so I'll take it! Now if I can just stay awake through another 14-hour workday, the day will be a rousing success.