Running Chick

This was a pretty high mileage week and aside from the epic blister that I developed about 3 miles into my 9 mile long run, I felt pretty decent for each run.

Monday – 3 easy becomes 4 easy (@ 10:12)

Josh, Amy and I planned our schedule 3 miler for lunch on Monday. Everybody wanted something flat, so I suggested an out & back on the waterfront. The path is used mostly by snowmobiles in the winter, so I was hoping that it’d be hard packed enough to easily run on. It got a little rough in the section between the Super 8 & the Dee Stadium, but for the most part it was pretty decent. We were only supposed to run 3 but Amy and I lost track of time gabbing away didn’t turn around until the 2 mile mark, so we ended up with 4 miles for the day.

Tuesday – 8 x 400 Intervals

We usually do these up at the SDC track, but work trumped runch so I ended up doing them on my treadmill after work.  I do find doing intervals on the treadmill easier than the track. I set up a work out on my FR620 to alert every quarter-mile, I hit a button to speed the treadmill up, and hit another button to slow down. Pretty brainless.

I will say that having the watch right in front of my face was both a blessing and a curse because each time I looked a that the distance, it was way less then I thought I’d gone. I’d be sprinting along, convinced that I was half-way done, and I’d glance that watch only to see that it said I went .06 miles. Demoralizing, I tell you.

I don't know why my 2nd & 3rd intervals are slower than the rest, I had the treadmill speed set the same for everything. Strange, but oh well.

I get a giggle out of the peaks and valleys on the interval graphs. You can see my warm-up, which I think was 10 minutes(?), and then each interval. My between-interval recovery was 12:00, but toward the end, I slowed down to 12:15 because I need a little bit longer for my heart rate to come back down from the atmosphere.

I cranked up the speed after the 4th interval, as you can tell by the peaks in this graph. I was pushing over 180 bpm on those last ones, but I never felt like puking. Bonus.

I don’t know why I have that outlier on the cadence graph.

I ended the last interval right around 4.5 miles, so I cooled down until I hit 5 miles and called it quits. This was a tough work out but I felt surprisingly good in the end. Tired, but a good tired.

Wednesday – 3 miles easy turns into 5 (@ 10:17)

Another extended easy run for this week. It was nice out and I decided to run down to my mom & dad’s house with Zoe instead of noodling around the neighborhood. I also decided to use this run as an wear both my FR305 & FR620 devices to see how they matched up.

The good news is that the distances were pretty much right on. The FR620 would always alert first, but the FR305 was never more than a second behind.

Unfortunately the instantaneous paces were off the entire way, by a lot. For the most part, the FR620 always said that I was going faster than the FR305, but I think the FR305 was the accurate one just based on how I was feeling & what my heart rate was saying.

I figured the two were going to be far apart, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were pretty darn spot on.

One thing that I was also pleased about was the cadence. I’ve been using a footpod attached to my right shoe with the FR305 and it seems to frequently lose contact with the device. The FR620 has an accelerometer in the watch and the heart rate monitor strap.

Here’s the chart for the FR620:

And for the FR305:

Zoe and I did stop briefly to talk to Josh who was biking his way home, but that’s the only drop-off that we had with the FR620. The FR305 was all over the map, which was pretty typical. I was never impressed with that thing. I haven’t done any more comparisons since, maybe I’ll take both of them on next weekend’s long run.

Thursday – 40 minute tempo

I think I’ve read every article that the internet has to offer on doing tempos and I’m still feel like I’m just winging it. This time, instead of running by pace, I thought I’d run by heart rate. According to a lot of the articles I read, I should be running a tempo “comfortably hard” or between 80%-90% of my maximum heart rate. My resting heart rate is 61 and my maximum heart rate is 190, so 80-90% translates to between 164-177bpm for me.

There’s this cool feature on the Garmin Connect website which allows you to set up workouts, and you can set limits like pace, cadence or heart rate zones to your intervals. So, I created this workout with a heart rate zone and zapped it over to my watch.

After the mile warm-up, it beeped five times and told me to GET GOING. It beeped at me in the most annoying manner until my heart rate was in the configured zone. Once I got in the zone, it gave a happy little chirp. When I fell out of the zone, I got an angry little chirp. Once I hit the 40 minute time limit, it played a little song (I'm not sure if I was supposed to dance or not) to let me know that the workout was over and I could do whatever I wanted for the rest of the time.

The tempo went pretty well, I felt like I was running at a pace which was a challenge, but I could sustain throughout the interval.  I had to push to keep my heart rate in the zone on the downhills but I didn’t have to slow down at all when I hit the uphills.

I ended up going just over 4.5 miles at and 8:44 pace for the 40 minutes, just under a 10k overall. Bonus, I didn’t feel like death when it was all over. I guess this means progress?

Friday – REST

TGIF and my running shoes can stay in the closet on this day.

Saturday – 3 miles easy (@ 11:27)

Josh and I were heading out of town on a quick trip to Menominee, MI first thing in the morning and I didn’t want to miss this run so I got up at 5:45AM and hit the treadmill. I forgot to plug in the footpod calibration factor into my FR620, so it only registered 2.87 miles when the treadmill hit 3 miles. Oops.

Anyway, this was only three miles, but they felt really hard. My legs were heavy and stiff and I felt pretty uninspired to push any faster.

After a shower, I dropped off Zoe at my mom & dad’s and we took off to Menominee (in a snowstorm, no less) to pick up this beauty. Take that, snow.

Sunday – 90 minute long run

This was just okay. It was cold, really windy and I developed a blister at mile 3 which caused me major discomfort for the rest of the run. Couple that with being over-tired from the long drive from the previous day and you have a meh run.

Summary

I ended up with 32.25 miles for the week, which I believe is the most weekly miles I've ever logged for any of my previous half marathons. I'm sort of surprised, but I'm feeling pretty good after all this running. Aside from Sunday's blister and some tight calves, my body's holding up pretty well (leaving now, to knock on some wood).  I like the variety of the runs - even though I'm growing to loathe tempos - it makes the week go by faster and it makes me feel like I'm actually training with focus rather than just plodding along aimlessly.

This week, we revisit hills (oh joy) and try not to die during a 45 minute tempo.