6 Miles - 10/3

Today I decided to do 6 miles to try out a truss I received in the mail yesterday, which I had ordered earlier in the week. The truss basically provides support where the defect in the abdominal wall exists, so that the condition does not get any worse. By the way, the doctor confirmed the diagnosis, and I will be scheduling repair surgery over the winter.

In short, it appears that the truss does the trick. I ran the full 6 miles without feeling anything strange. The better test will come on Sunday when I do a full 12 miles, but given the results so far, I am 99.9% sure that I have found a temporarily solution to keep the hernia from getting worse while still allowing me to run the half in a couple weeks.

So my primary goal with the 6 today was simply to see if the truss would work, but I also decided to try and keep a race pace that I felt like I could sustain for 13 miles, and see where the time and HR ended up. In other worse, rather than be governed by heart rate, I would pace myself based on how I felt, and projecting how I would feel later on in the run. I felt pretty strong for the first 4 miles or so, but the last two miles of my 6 mile loop have some hills. At this point I decided to keep the speed up a bit, knowing it would kill any endurance - but I was curious as to how I would feel at the end - whether I would have much in the tank left or not. I also felt like having an extended period of time with the HR in the 170's would be good. I'd have Saturday as a rest day, and Sunday as a long slow run day.

Total Distance: 6 miles
Total Time: 55:12
Avg HR: 161

At the end, I felt like I could have gone farther, but the pace definately would have dropped. Up until the last two miles, I was surprised that even though my HR was in the 160-165 range quite a bit, my breathing was nice and relaxed. My legs felt like they were definately working, but not overworked. It seemed to be a nice comfortable race pace. Of course, all that kinda went out the window with the hills towards the end.

I'm a little surprised the avg HR was 161 - it felt like once I warmed up (the first 8-10 minutes) it was always above 160. However, during the downhill portions, the HR tends to plummet into the 140's - so I guess that had more of an effect on the average then I would have thought