Apparently if it's a Saturday afternoon and it's been raining in the morning and it's supposed to rain all day, all I have to do to get it to completely clear up is decide to go for a mid-afternoon run during one of the non-raining spells. This is even more likely to succeed if I completely forget about sunscreen.
That's what happened today and two weeks ago.
I really need to run more often. No more of this huge chunks of time off from running for comps or baseball tournaments. It totally undermines my training and makes the few runs after I start again not very much fun.
Between letting my running lapse and the heat/humidity/sun today, I ran into high heart rate issues that caused me to have to slow down significantly.
I did 5k today in 36:18. (Since I have my GPS watch now, I know it was actually 5k, whereas before, I only knew that it was approximately a given distance.) That's an 11:42 min/mile average. But look at these times: 11:07 first mile, 11:43 second mile, 12:25 third mile (and there would have been more of a discrepancy if the first mile hadn't been a slow ascent while the third was a slow descent).
My average heart rate for the first mile was 148 bpm. For the second 169. And for the third 174 bpm. (Overall average 164.) Ideally, I think (based on various online calculations), I want to train at below 156-168 bpm. No wonder I was struggling with mile three!
My fancy gps watch (birthday present from my parents!) helped me figure out all that stuff about pace per mile and heartbeats per minute. But I don't need fancy technology to help me conclude these two things about how to help get my heart rate down on runs:
1) don't take 10 days off from running
2) don't run at 2pm on hot days
I may not have worked out the physical part of this running thing yet, but I'm getting the gear and the strategy totally figured out!
On Tuesday, I will go for a 4 mile run. I have a baseball game on Monday and so I can't do it then and a 4 mile run wouldn't work for me tomorrow after the 3.1 miles today.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is a phenomenal Dare! I am attempting to become a runner as well actually. We have a really nice track (minus the abundance of mosquitos) right by our apartment. I just started yesterday (June 19) - but here's to trying!
ReplyDeleteBrandy