Am I Training Hard Enough?

I was reading Runners World this weekend and ran across the comment that speed workouts in a training program build on each other. Crap! I've probably ran 50% of mine. They're just not my favorite thing to do. When I do them, I'm not sure that there's enough intensity.

This morning, I really pushed it. 1 x 400, 1 x 800, 1 x 1200, 1 x 1600, 1x 1200, 1 x 800, 1 x 400. I recalled the instructions wrong and cheated myself on recovery time in between. I'm sure it showed in my times, I could feel that I needed more job time. Anyways, I was dead tired at the end, which is how I should probably feel at the end of a speed workout.

I haven't done everything that I could possibly do thus far to be prepared to do my best for the MCM, but I have been turning things around lately.

I was just reading CRN and ran across a reference to this NYT article about young women runners not acheiving their full potential. The reasons given are that women don't feel as compfortable being competitive and they have been discouraged by the easy miles concept (which helps when you're starting to run, but not with performance).

I'm a big advocate of easy miles. They are more enjoyable for one thing. But I've known for a some months that if I want to see what I can do, I'm going to have to trade in some of the easy miles for speed workouts and tempo runs. I just have a nasty hait of turning my structured workouts into easy runs or skipping them all together.