Early Morning Run Today
Thanks Rachel and Clyde for the great tips this morning during our 5 mile run. Running with the two of you doing your interval run/walk pace made the time really fly and I didn't feel at all like I had completed 5 miles.
The new inserts in my shoes seem to be a definite help to my planters fasciitis and woohoo the shin splints seem to have totally disappeared.
This is such a new experience for an old runner and I am truly appreciative of the knowledge that is shared by the ERC members.
25 days to race day, I'm definitely excited.
4 comments:
Great job on the 5 mile run, and it does help to pass the time when you have others to talk with.
Thanks for the comment about my crawfish post and my swimming abilities. However, if you saw me in the water you might think I was reenacting the opening scene from Jaws by the way I thrash about.
As for the Father/Daughter dance, we have dress rehearsals on Saturday and then Wednesday night of next week (show starts on Thursday). I'll be sure to post some more pictures.
Keep up the great work, I know you will do awesome in 25 days!
Hey, thanks for visiting my blog. You do a great job on yours. Like the pics.
Looks like we do run about at the same pace. Although you have some faster miles than me.
Good luck on your upcoming half.
Pat
Arizona, USA
A few words on HR. You may already know all this ... but here goes:
1) Monitoring your HR gives you a simple indicator as to how hard your body is working to keep all system functioning. The more demands you place on your body in terms of oxygen requirements and cooling, the faster the heart will pump blood in an attempt to meet those demands, all the way up to HRmax. But, you need to keep in mind that HR is just an easily measured indicator to help you with your training. There are no absolutes. For example, you can’t say that you hit your lactate threshold (LT) at 86.337% HRmax. You only know that it’s probably somewhere between 80-90% HRmax.
2) The heart pumps blood through the body to supply oxygen to the muscles and uses blood to facilitate cooling; therefore, you’ll see your HR increase when the temperature or humidity increase. I know that it’s obvious, but you need to always keep in mind that your body will work harder to run 9:20/mi at 85F than it will at 55F.
3) HRmax is the maximum rate at which your heart will beat. It is NOT the maximum rate at which your heart should beat. You can't do much to improve your HRmax. It is what it is and tends to decrease with age (sorry).
4) The standard HRmax formula (220-AGE) is crap, it is not gospel. It is a linear formula developed to provide you with a 95% confidence interval that your HR is above this number. It is not the average. When your 20, it doesn’t really matter; when you’re 51 (or 52 in my case) it make’s a huge difference. My measured HRmax is 174. My formulaic HRmax is 168. I need those extra 6 BPM.
5) Although you can’t do anything to improve your HRmax, your HRrest (or resting HR) will decrease as your level of fitness improves. Your resting HR gives you a far better indication of your level of fitness since it removes so many variables (heat, humidity, activity level, stress, etc). To measure your resting HR, put your HR monitor on and lay down for 20 or 30 minutes. Your HR will go down, down, down as you relax. You can consider this your base HR or the minimum amount of effort your body needs to simply keep all the basic systems running. The less amount of energy it takes to operate the basics gives you more range to work with for running.
The best things you can do to lower the effort it takes to run at a given pace are simple, loose weight and improve your cardio-vascular system. The lower the mass, the less energy it takes to run under any given set of conditions. The more capillaries you develop, the more efficient your body becomes at cooling and transporting oxygen. The best pace for improving that cardio-vascular system is to run within your Aerobic Range; usually between 70-80% of HRmax. By definition, you are clearing lactate faster than you are producing it within this range and are primarily using fat as fuel, so you can run for hours in this range. That’s why I was trying to do my recovery runs under 140. I wanted to make sure I was staying within my aerobic range and away from my LT.
One mistake that I see many beginning runners do is trying to run too fast for their aerobic runs, pushing themselves well into the anaerobic range and punking out after 30 minutes and then wondering why they aren’t improving. My buddy Mike was the one that finally drummed into my thick skull that I needed to slow down my basic runs to run faster in races. Before I met Mike, I ran all my workouts at 8:30/mi and raced 10Ks somewhere are 7:50/mi. In addition, it took a full week to recover from a 10K. Now I run my slow aerobic runs between 9:00-9:30 and race 10Ks around 7:12/mi. The biggest difference was that before Mike, I ran between 3 to 5 miles a day, 4 days a week. The thought of mid-week 10 miler was just crazy talk. Now I run 35 – 55 miles a week, with 80% at a general aerobic pace. It’s made a huge difference. I’ve still got a long way to go, but I think this general approach to training will get me where every my body will let me go.
You can do the same. It only takes a little bit of time.
Thanks for stopping by my blog! It's great to see a fellow Texan and Aggie out there running. Glad your inserts helped...plantar faciitis and shin splints are not fun!
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