Sunday, November 18, 2007

Another weekly roundup

I seem to be having some issues with blogger. It won't let me edit my last post so I'll start a new one. I hope it's going to be short as it's been a long day.

I had a great/enjoyable/relaxing/fun run with Andrew this morning as we meandered around the old lake once again. The 17 miles went by in a flash and were almost effortless. My average heartrate was only 129 which was a few beats lower than Andrews but not quite enough to account for our age difference. You see I'm a bit older and so should be slower, right? Actually, pace or competition is never an issue in our runs and we always go along at the ideal speed for the day and today it was me always 1/2 step ahead according to the shadows.

Andrew also has let the cat out of the bag or at least has piqued her curiosity about my latest pseudo-injury. I'm not calling it anything yet because it hasn't yet cut my runs short but it (my sore right knee) has been a bit of a pain all week. It came without warning out of left field and seems to come and go almost at random. For example today it was 'there' when I woke up, but didn't show up until mile 3-5 of our run as a bit of a dull ache, disappeared during the hilly 2nd part of the run and then was replaced by the usual old tight hamstrings of before. Post run it's been totally fine and I'm not worried (yet).

This past week's running was a total of 50 miles in 6 runs as I slowly ramp the base up for Beantown. The runs varied between 5 and 8 miles and even managed to run a very slow recovery run with average heartrate of 127 at a pace of 8:44. Andrew thinks I can go even slower and gave me some good tips today! Go figure! Most runners are trying to figure how to go faster and here we are scheming on how to try to go slower!!

I'll do my best but no promises. Have a great week out there.

6 comments:

Andrew said...

That Jo! What a sleuth!

Great run today. We'll have to recall it when we're battling 30 below with a stiff North wind in a few weeks.

Dubs said...

hee hee! :)

I never can figure out HR. I was told to do the 220 - age which brings me to 184 for max, but I hit 204 in September and lived to tell. :) I reset my Garmin to make that my max.

MB said...

You guys are having an epiphany on slow running?

Grellan said...

Whats the motivation/reason for the slow running if you are comfortable with your pace?

Hope the knee issue goess away.

Love2Run said...

Grellan, Google 'HADD running' to get some background on the program that Andrew is now following. I'm not yet a convert but the basic idea is that our comfortable easy pace can still often be too hard to allow recovery for the hard days.

If you read about how the Kenyan's train, their easy days are very very easy while their hard days are simply brutal. We mortals on the other hand will ofter run at the same moderate pace day in and day out. What you see me doing is an attempt to slow down on the easy days but so far all my running has been 'easy' and easier as I continue recovery ;-)

Grellan said...

Mike. I tried HADD over the summer and my understanding was that the harder runs were easier (i.e. sub LT effort - marathon HR less 10 to 15 BPM) and the easier runs slightly harder - Marathon HR less 45 to 50 BPM - of course this could mean 120 bpm or less for you, which is where Andrew is trying to take you.

For me HADD was 150/155 BPM hard efforts and 130/135 BPM easier efforts up from my usual 125/130BPM easy runs.