Speed workout- I survived

So tonight I attended the first speed workout one of our local running stores is hosting. It is from 5:30-7 pm (I thought I'd last maybe 60 minutes). The stores plan is to have this every Wednesday night here on out at our local university track. I of course never one to shy away from these type of challenges ( baptism by fire, jump right into the deep end, 'who says you should have a 10 K or even 1/2 marathon under your belt before running a full'). So I got to the track 2 minutes after 5:30, which is unheard of because I'm one of those annoying people who gets to places 5 min before hand, but the traffic and drivers who were holding to the 25 mile speed limit made me late. So the group was already starting their warm up. So I jumped on in and ran .8 miler for warm up. Then we did group stretch and introductions, and some static and dynamic workouts as group. This was then followed by breaking us up into groups (newbie and seasoned speed demons). Well you can guess what group I leaned to- newbie ( I get my miles in but I'm no Tazmanian devil). Our workout following the 10 minute warm up and stretch session went as follows: 200 at 40-50 sec pace,400 at 1:40-1:50 pace, and 600 at 2:40-2:50 pace. Pacing is hard and I really stink at pacing so I loved that the coach kept us in check. He was super helpful with form and talking about not losing form when speeding up After the 600 we reversed (aka did ladder) and did 600, 400, 200 with goal of maintaining the paces for each distance. I thought it was a good workout. I didn't feel overly taxed physically,but it definitely was a different kind of running. My legs and arms needed to obviously move quicker. My breathing was at first hard for me to find my rhythm, and the wind hitting me right in the face didn't help. However, I completed the whole ladder with no feelings of "I'm going to die, or barf, or both" at the end of the runs. I'll definitely be back. This will be the main way I plan to fit my speed work in for my training schedule. One thing I did find was I'm not going to be able to monitor my mileage real accurately because the starting and stopping of the Garmin was too distracting for me. So I'm just going to try and add up our total sprint distances we do for the night- average it. Side note it was just me and another lady there tonight, and I had no problem with it. The guys were all super supportive and we, despite running as a group, all did our own thing. When we went around introducing ourselves and saying a little bit about our running history this one guy said he took a late start to running (50 now 56), but despite this late start has run 14 marathons- amazing! I'm hoping this speed work, added to my cross training, and long runs plus regular training miles will all equal a happy, healthy, and maybe faster Chi-town finish this fall. Keep you posted. Oh- and I will be trying to finalize my training schedule for this coming fall marathon real soon- into week 2 of training.