A Spoonful of Sugar

Having a daughter with a new-found interest in physical exercise and a long-standing love of cooking means that I now have a resident source of nutritional advice for my running. She's insisting that I get properly hydrated after a run, and she's even gone so far as to bake a batch of energy bars. I don't know if they're better than what you can buy in the shops, but I'm sure that she's thrown in all the complex carbohydrates that you could want. From what I can tell, they're from a recipe in a book on sports nutrition that she's borrowed from the library, and which I have started to read to get what I can from it.
With my different attitude to things, what I've picked up is that, as you start to exercise, the first "fuel" mechanism that kicks in is the anaerobic cycle. This is because the body, starting from rest, takes a time to react to exercise by increasing heart-rate and breathing, so that there is very little oxygen in the blood. THIS is why it's important to warm up - because if you don't, when you start to run, you got straight into lactic acid debt, and the body then has to catch up and repay that debt by breathing faster than you need to for the exercise that you are doing, plus having the painful muscles that follows from lactic acid, so that you very soon are unable to run as fast as you might otherwise do, and in more discomfort. With my rather wholesale lack of warming up at Delamere, it's surprising that I went as well as I did.
So what I need to do is warm up beforehand, so I tried for this Tuesday's interval session - especially important for that. A short jog got the heart rate up to 140, which is about 60% of my working zone - bottom end of recovery running. I think that I probably need a longer warm up, but still only raising the heart rate to 140. Certainly, the later intervals (I walk/jogged the heart rate back down to 140 in between) were OK, so I'll just have to work on the opening warm up.