intervals... how do you do them?

for last night's run, i decided to do intervals and attempt to increase my speed... which is a joke

just wondering how others work on intervals



this is what we did:
we ran at the high school track.
i ran as fast as i could for the straight parts and walked the curves. i did this for 25 minutes.

Re: intervals... how do you do them?

I used to do them all different ways.

Sometimes I would go by distance, usually either 200 or 400m. So the workout would be something like warm up, run an interval, recover, run an interval. I usually only did 4-6 intervals and then cooled down. The recovery portion would vary in length but was at least as long as the interval itself.

Or you can do less formal intervals, which I like better. So warm up, then run fast for as long you can/want to (you can use landmarks like a lamp, house etc if you are on the streets). Then recover as long as you feel you need. Repeat until you've gone as far or as long as you wanted to that day.

There's also what they call tempo runs where you do the middle portion of your run fast, but not as fast as intervals. So you would warm up, run a few miles at your tempo pace, and then cool down. I like those too b/c you're not killing yourself but you are out of breath.