Thursday, February 07, 2008

Patience

For the past years I have generally been able to tell the state of my fitness by monitoring my heart rate during my runs, especially my easy runs. Accordingly I've kept a close eye on my HR since I've resumed running after my pneumonia, and the results aren't exactly what I was hoping for. The heart rate did drop by quite a few beats for the first few days, but hasn't really improved since. The situation is slightly complicated by the fact that I have changed from my trusty basic Polar HRM to a more fancy and less reliable Garmin, but I can still track the progress - or lack of it. Maybe I'm just too impatient, and an improvement is just around the corner, but somehow I'm getting doubts about how much those 5-mile easy runs are doing for me. I'm slowly increasing the mileage of my runs in the hope that the situation will improve. I'm still running exclusively easy runs, even though the HR is up to levels that were previously reserved for high tempo runs. I seem to have adopted 8:30 pace as my cruising pace over the last few days, and comparing those workouts to past ones doesn't make pretty reading. On 22 November I ran 10 miles at 8:20 pace with a HR of 139. Yesterday I ran 10 miles over the same course at 8:24 pace with an average HR of 158. Not good. But, as I've said, maybe I'm just too impatient.

The worst thing was running 10 miles alongside Caragh Lake with the Garmin at my wrist and realising that the 5-mile turnaround point was almost 50 seconds further out than previously thought. I'm not going to go back through my running logs and add 10 seconds per mile to the pace for each run on the course, but that would have been the correct pace, I'm afraid. Ah well.

Actually, saying that I'm increasing the mileage of my runs isn't entirely accurate. I'm not setting my alarm in the morning, just get up whenever I wake naturally, and that pretty much determines the miles I have time for (and if Shea wakes up with me I have to sacrifice a mile or two to make him breakfast and have a chat). As it happens, yesterday I got up at 6:10, which left enough time for 10 miles, today I got up 10 minutes later and managed 8.5 miles, which was perfectly fine by me. The weather has improved, I didn't get any rain, even though the dark clouds looked rather ominous this morning. The temperature yesterday had been 0C/32F, today it was balmy 13C/55F, and I was roasting in my two layers.

We're off to Dublin tomorrow for a wedding. My miles will most likely take a slight hit there. And I have to avoid the evil eye of my mother-in-law. For years she has insisted that all that running is very bad for me, and I'm going to make a young widow out of Niamh (she really said that). She was almost triumphant when I developed pneumonia, because it had proved her right. She'll be absolutely disgusted to see me running again.

6 Feb
10 miles, 1:23:55, 8:24 pace, HR 158
7 Feb
8.5 miles, 1:12:02, 8:28 pace, HR 158
Posted by at 7:07 pm
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8 comments:

  1. GrellanThu Feb 07, 09:21:00 pm

    The HR may be at 158, but does it feel like 158 effort. No harm to cross check against the Polar.

    Your mother-in-law may be on to something - running must be bad for you, otherwise everyone would be doing it. Now drinking on the other hand must be good as it's very popular in some quarters and never harmed anyone.

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  2. EwenFri Feb 08, 06:47:00 am

    Lucky you didn't say 'avoid the eye of my evil mother in law' ;)

    The HR will come down - give it 3 or 4 weeks. I can relate to your short 5-mile turn... I remember being terribly disappointed when the 13k course I'd run for years turned out to be only 12.93k.

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  3. BruceFri Feb 08, 10:25:00 am

    You'll soon be back to your old fitness levels i bet. Well done on treating yourself to a Garmin, I've wanted to get one too for a while now, it seems to be a must have for most bloggers. My mileages and inability to stay injury free for long periods have detered me to date. One day though.

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  4. AnonymousFri Feb 08, 12:34:00 pm

    Thomas,

    I'm using a Garmin305 for about 3 months now and wasn't sure about the accuracy of the distances so paid attention to them on the last two races I ran. For the Belgooly 4 mile the Garmin told me I ran 4.01 miles and for the Mallow 10 it told me I ran 10.06 miles. I’m betting the distances of the races were more accurate then the Garmin! Good luck in getting back to fitness, I’m in a similar but not as severe situation as I’m recovering from a lung infection.

    Sean

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  5. AnonymousFri Feb 08, 05:33:00 pm

    For your next run I would use the polar HR just to double check, and if the HR is still the same I would think long and hard about training at all. Is your resting pulse normal? or is it also high?

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  6. Love2RunFri Feb 08, 11:59:00 pm

    Watch out for the evil eye. I used to get it all the time when my favorite sport was golfing. Times have changed...

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  7. AnonymousSat Feb 09, 04:19:00 am

    I had to laugh due to the comments about your mother in law. I hope the progress moves forward to your liking sometime soon.

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  8. AnonymousSun Feb 10, 05:55:00 pm

    I used to religiously keep check on my heart rate with my Polar too.

    I then read quite a bit about using perceived effort instead of % heart rate.

    I then also bought a Garmin (I've started a review on my site) and now don't really worry about my HR on runs.

    I must admit though, I'm still very very very very much in the base run mode... and am only on 2 milers until the ankle/achilles tendons are completely recovered.

    Still, I think there's a lot to be said for using perceived effort instead of %HR. I mean, there's so many things that can effect your heart rate - lack of sleep, temperature, etc, etc....

    I've started to add a review of the Garmin to my blog.... it will grow as I get back to runs that are actually worth testing it out fully on!

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