Sunday 21 January 2018

Plodding and Pacing

It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it’s very welcome. Satisfaction! Satisfaction of a good run where you can be pleased with the way it’s unexpectedly turned out.

On a couple of jogs during the previous week I’d tried out the new toy, the Heart Rate Monitor. Initially, to set it up I’d used the figures recommended in most of the literature I’ve read on the subject, that the Maximum heart rate would be 220 minus my age. That gives me a maximum figure of 145 beats per minute. Then, using that figure I calculated a low and a high HR of 70% and 80% as a band within which to keep my actual rate during training runs, so as not to overdo things initially. That meant that I would have to jog at a speed that would keep the watch showing any figure between 101 and 116 beats per minute.

Unfortunately it just didn’t work out like that. My HR was already heading above 100 as I started off on the warm up jog, and that’s about as slow as it gets. By the time I’d warmed up the HR was well above the maximum 116 anyway, at around 150-160. I persevered and towards the end of the run found that the maximum bpm I could get, after a long sustained run, was 185, and that was about it. After two or three pushes as hard as I could sustain I’d seen a maximum of 187 on the clock. Not brilliant, but a better maximum baseline to work from than the 145 I’d previously calculated. I reprogrammed the 70/80% to 130 to 150 bpm using the 185 bpm as a baseline for the jogs this week.

During this week two jogs in Bushy were plodded out using the heart rate monitor. The first on Monday was around the usual ParkRun course and went more or less okay, but was slow enough not to promise any great performances. The second was around the first part of the ParkRun course but headed off at a tangent from the two mile mark, out to the perimeter of the park and around the fence to bring me back to the car park with a bit over four and a half miles under the belt. On both jogs the HRM was showing around 160 at what I would normally have regarded as a ‘steady’ pace and I had to continually back off to to get within the 70/80% figures. Confusingly, in fact I was actually within a 80/90% band. 

On Saturday’s ParkRun I left the HRM off, just promising myself a hardish run and get home in the 28 minute bracket. The weather was abysmal. Rain had turned the track part of the course to very slippery mud and puddles on the hogging path. I had though forgotten that the third Saturday of the month is Pacemaker day, and by chance I found myself standing behind the pacemaker for 29 minutes. That seemed very convenient to stay with her and try to inject a bit more pace at the end to get inside 28 minutes, where I felt I should have been a week ago. 

The previous training must have done some good because I found it easy to stay with the pacemaker throughout the jog. In fact in the last half I was ahead quite comfortably and going easily although the slippery surfaces were making it necessary to curtail the pace at times. The last part of the course I was able to up the pace and running through the last 0.10 to the finish overtook some fifteen others. At first I thought I’d done quite well and if the pacemaker had done her job correctly I’d be well down the 28 minutes. Unfortunately she hadn’t. The pacemaker came in late and if i had stuck with her I’d have registered another result well down the 29 minutes. As it was the bit of pace at the end took me in at 29:01. It was still in the 29 minute bracket, but at least ‘just’ in. 


But the point was that the jog had felt good and the pace at the end easy. It may be it was the prior runs that had helped by being able to maintain a good continuous pace, but it was encouraging… for a change.

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