Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Double Running Goodness

Today calls for copious amounts of rain and this in and of itself is not a problem. But the prospect of running this evening while Owen is at basketball practice just didn't appeal to me and so I shook things up a bit.

Before work I was going to run no matter what the weather and, remarkably, as I set off at a little past 6am it was barely drizzling on me. I had a nice easy 5km run that seemed to (as usual) feel better with every kilometre.

Then, while at work, I sat there wondering just how tough it would be to get myself out the door for another run should the forecast prove true and the rains came. Well, I think my mind was influenced by the fact that I got soaked on my way to work while biking and was not in the mood for more potential sogginess. Therefore, instead of doing a 40 minute abdominal routine at the gym (my shoulder and neck are still all funked up and I am continuing to avoid upper body weight training at the moment) I decided to jump on the old treadmill yet again.

To make things interesting I decided to see what would happen if I pushed the pace a bit past my BQ pace of 8.1mph (or 7:26/mile in runner speak). Since the whole HTML table things is working for me here's what happened:

DurationSpeedPace (miles)Pace (km)
5:006.2mph9:39/mile6:00/km
5:007.5mph7:59/mile4:58/km
5:008.5mph7:03/mile4:22/km
4:007.5mph7:59/mile4:58/km
4:008.5mph7:03/mile4:22/km
3:007.5mph7:59/mile4:58/km
3:008.5mph7:03/mile4:22/km
2:007.5mph7:59/mile4:58/km
2:008.5mph7:03/mile4:22/km
1:007.5mph7:59/mile4:58/km
1:008.5mph7:03/mile4:22/km
4:386.2mph9:39/mile6:00/km
39:387.6mph7:56/mile4:56/km

Not bad, eh?! The total distance was 8km and I was quite pleased with both the distance and the intensity of the workout. Clearly I have a long way to go, but these types of efforts can only help in my quest to qualify for Boston next year.

And since today is the last day of the month and I am not planning on running a third time I can now summarize my running for November thusly:


So, there it is. A decent month of running. I'm especially happy to see the average speed move up a bit from October (where it sat at a paltry 9.8km/h!). Although my average heart rate is up I am not concerned with that. I figure that running a whole year at low heart rates is enough and it's time to start slowly moving on up. Still in the aerobic range, but no longer moving like a snail. (More like a frightened sloth...)

And lastly, since I am short on time I will not post it here, but in the next couple of days I would like to share a very interesting and important article about the physiology of running that my Dad alerted me to (thanks Tata!). Every would be and seasoned marathoner would be well served to read it. Stay tuned!

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2 Comments:

Blogger Nitmos said...

I don't know if it was intentional or not but your chart seems to indicate that you intervalled it. (7:59's to 7:03 and repeat)

You're on your way!

November 30, 2010 at 2:17 PM  
Blogger Vava said...

Oh, it was intentional alright! Once I ran the first 5 minute segment at 7:03/mile I knew it would be really tough to try it again. At that moment I decided to do that downward interval sort of thing and pretty much just ended up hanging on for dear life!

November 30, 2010 at 2:25 PM  

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