BFB

Practiced my procrastination today and pushed my run off until early evening. Worked out for the better, as I ended up with some idle time to think about where I wanted to run. Hard to make this decision today – I wouldn’t be satisfied with a mere joyride. I needed something to focus on. And since I’m feeling antsy these days I didn’t want to go to the track or do a tempo run. So, as an attempt to make use of a great local resource, I decided to run the Ben Franklin Bridge.

This bridge can be divided roughly into 9 sections by the arcades that suspend the traffic lights (lane control lights). I could have done something like 8 x 75 second repeats up a single stretch, but this seemed too formal. I decided to just run the whole bridge back and forth, alternating hard and recovery efforts between the arcades. Turned into the 1st real hard workout I’ve done in some time. Readers beware: the remainder of this post will delve into split times and distances, but I’ll try to be as poetic as I can about it. I’m getting this down mostly as a reference for myself for future attempts.

The approximate distances between the arcades are from 250 to 350 m. Since what goes up must come down, I’d be running 2 hard uphills, then 2 hard downhills, then turn around and repeat back to Philly. After about a 3½-mile jaunt around Penn’s Landing, the workout went something like this:

PA TO NJ
340 m up, 74 s
260 m rest, 87 s
260 m up, 53 s
270 m rest, 86 s
270 m down, 52 s
260 m rest, 80 s
270 m down, 51 s
500 m rest, 153 s

NJ TO PA
290 m up, 57 s
270 m rest, 99 s
260 m up, 56 s
270 m rest, 90 s
270 m down, 53 s
260 m rest, 83 s
260 m down, 47 s

These splits are approximate, but fairly accurate. The bridge turns asymmetrical on the Jersey side so the last rest over there got extended. I adjusted the Garmin so it only showed me my split times. Also HR, only to find out my max. It seems to be just about 197. As it turned out, my splits were fairly consistent, adjusting for the slight differences in their distances. Looking forward to doing this again, but probably not for a couple weeks.

Altogether about 8 miles in about an hour. Average HR 173.