The knee and hip responded well to easing back on the amount of jogging the previous week so I revisited the local recreation ground on Friday morning to do a few gentle laps. Circulating around the half mile long perimeter at around 5 minutes each until I reached the three mile point went reasonably well, if a bit slow. Actually the cold weather wasn’t very conducive to expending large amounts of energy and it was difficult to even get warmed up. Nevertheless, I’d decided to bite the bullet and return to the club Hare and Hounds on the following day so I was happy to complete a rather muted session.
I had intended to take the boat out before embarking on the H&H, at least to get the feel of the thing again as I haven’t been in a boat of any kind since December. Unfortunately, what with one thing and another, I had left it too late to catch up so scrambling into the Laance for the first time in months at the start of the event, probably wasn’t the best of ideas. I did about a half mile warm up, soon finding that there was patchy but thin ice on the exposed surfaces of the canal and as the temperature had not yet got above freezing it wasn’t likely to be clearing any time soon.
It didn’t go particularly well. The outbound stretch was slow with a few pauses in the paddling to recoup, although I settled into the boat again during the first mile. The 180 degree turn at the end of the outbound was a bit flakey. At least I didn’t suffer the ignominy and cold of an immersion. On the way back I was fast running out of steam and was glad to pass the finish albeit at a very stately pace. The time was very forgettable but at least it won’t do any harm to my handicap for next time.
On Monday evening it was back to the jogging training sessions. This time our coach had picked out a circuit of about 500 meters around a block of houses as the recreation ground was still muddy and slippery from recent rain. After the usual warm up and stretching we had the pleasure of another interval session around the block. These were spaced out at 1x lap, 2x laps, 3x laps and back to 1x lap with 2 minutes rest between each effort. The intention was to do them at 5k pace and the final lap faster. Once more, doing it on the hard road surface started to make the knee feel a bit suspect so it was just as well the session was fairly short.
Rather than risk the knee any further, on Wednesday I opted for another session in the boat. Apart from anything else I wanted to find out how practical the heart rate monitor would be in the boat sessions. Using it while jogging isn’t proving to be telling me very much. Starting off on a slow warm-up sends the HR up and over a hundred within a minute and it builds from there. Stopping and stretching helps it settle down and the response to the change in the amount of effort then become a bit slower. Even so the rates shown are always at the top end of ‘my’ scale. In most cases the normal pace I’m jogging at is producing a HR into the upper scale and pushing the pace a bit sends the HR up to near maximum. So from my point of view I haven’t got three bands of light, medium or heavy to choose from, only max all the time.
I hadn’t used the HRM in the H&H as I didn’t think I’d have time to rationalise the readings. On the Wey however, I was able to paddle at a steady rate and get a slower response to the change of HR. The amount of sustained effort I was able to keep up wasn’t a great deal and the highest rate I produced was 140 with an average rate over the whole session was of 110. One of the pleasing things though has been that the HR now comes back down again a bit quicker than it did before. This probably means that I’m giving myself recovery times between efforts rather longer than is necessary. It all needs a bit more work yet, but once I’ve got back to some sort of fitness I’ll have to work out a session that’ll push the envelope a bit further.
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