Evaluation

I felt surprisingly good on Monday morning. I expected to be tired after a reasonably heavy workload over the weekend but in actual fact I felt really good. I had done Saturday's run in the hope that a few faster miles would start decreasing my HR, though Monday might have been a bit early to expect improvements already. However, the numbers were indeed pretty good.

Of course, things are never that simple. Tuesday was everything I had feared Monday would be like, and worse. The fatigue seemed to have finally caught up with the legs, which felt sluggish for the entire 10 miles. However, the conditions very much added to the misery. It was really humid. My top was utterly drenched in sweat and of course my HR was way higher. I found it pretty much impossible to stop the HR from beeping and after 6 miles I finally had enough and turned it off. I was frustrated enough to decide to take the alarm off the watch entirely. Until last year I always ran my easy runs entirely by feel. In the early stages of a training cycle the HR was invariably higher and it always came down after a few weeks. At the end of base training I would usually run at my MAF heart rate - it's just that I had approached that value from the top rather from down as you would normally do. I tried that other approach in the last 2 training cycles and the result haven't been particularly encouraging - training was very often rather frustrating and my race in Turin wasn't stellar (though not bad either).

Taking off the HR app immediately improved my spirit. I think that alone makes it a good choice. Despite that lengthy treatise I've just written, the actual difference will be quite minimal, I think. The majority of my runs will be exactly the same. But I no longer have to slow down halfway through each climb on each and every hill along the way,

On Wednesday I did an evaluation, 4 weeks since the last one. The number in may had been a bit sobering and I sure hoped for a good improvement. The weather wasn't great and as I lay awake in bed a few minuted before the alarm would have gone off I wondered if I should postpone it by a dat because the humidity would surely have a negative impact on the numbers but in the end I decided to go ahead as planned.

The legs felt a lot better than on Tuesday and the humidity did not affect me much . If it had an effect on the numbers it was a small one.

       
        Mile 1    6:56   HR 161
        Mile 2    6:59   HR 161
        Mile 3    7:03   HR 161
        Mile 4    7:07   HR 161
        Recovery to HR 130: 39 seconds

Those aren't exactly brilliant numbers. There is some miniscule improvement to May but not a lot. I did slow down by more than 10 seconds per mile and this wasn't exactly fast. On the plus side, I found the effort fast but reasonably relaxed and managed to keep the HR very stable, which was better than last time when I struggled to keep the HR at the right level and it had oscillated way too much for my liking.

I'm pretty sure the Cork marathon still has some effect, without it the number would have been better. However, if the numbers are still in the same ballpark next month I will most likely start to panic.

15 Jun

10 miles, 1:21:30, 8:09 pace, HR 139

16 Jun

10 miles, 1:20:36, 8:04 pace, HR 147

17 Jun

11.8 miles, 1:30:10, 7:38 pace, HR 151

   incl. 4 mile eval: 6:56, 6:59, 7:03, 7:07; 39 sec recovery

18 Jun

11 miles, 1:26:48, 7:53 pace, HR 144