Not really sure why I bother keeping track of the days anymore. With the warm weather, it's not like I've been concentrating on P90X as much as I anticipated.
The past couple days I've done a couple runs around the neighborhood with the dogs again. I mostly wanted to see how my right foot acted after some slow, easy miles during a run lasting between 30-60 minutes, with the primary stress being two days in a row. So there was one run on the 23rd (day after my last post), followed by a rest day on the 24th, another easy run on the 25th, and a threshold run today.
Unfortunately, there was both a good and a bad. First off, the good: the right foot hasn't been a problem, even with running two days in a row, twice, with only a day in between. With the total being over 20 miles during that time, I'm pretty happy about that. Also, I am still able to put up a decent performance during the threshold runs in terms of pace and sustained HR. The bad: there are more and more signs that the very low amount of running over the past couple months is taking its toll.
Part of it, honestly, is my own doing - today was a day of throwing in a few variables that were detrimental to performance. First, I went out with no water, gatorade or anything. I knew I was going to be out for the better part of 90 minutes or so, but for whatever reason I just didn't feel like getting all that stuff prepared. Second, I tried playing with the workout feature of my HR monitor - setting it for one mile of a warm up (which I defined as a HR of less than 155), followed by 8 miles of a HR between 158 and 172, followed by a cooldown mile of a HR less than 150.
The workout experiment lasted all of about 1.25 miles. While I went slow, and the average HR during that mile was 144 - right about where it should be - the damn thing was so sensitive that it was beeping all over the place. Go up a tiny hill, it complains about the HR being too high - and that first mile, while certainly not describably as being 'hilly' - has a few gentle inclines that tend to bring the HR up briefly. After I got past the warmup mile and into the threshold, the HR monitor was then, almost immediately, complaining about HR being too high - as it was registering nearly 180. I know what a HR of 180 feels like, and I wasn't feeling that. Soon after it settled back down and registered a more accurate reading in the 150's. Not sure whether electrical interference was a problem (I've had interference with Polar HR monitors, but never the Forerunner), or weather it was poor conductivity of the chest strap - probably the latter - but either way the thing was complaining. And since it was complaining, I slowed up a bit before I realized it was registering high - so of course once it started reading correctly, my HR went below 155 and it started complaining about that. I ended up saying 'screw it' - I didn't want to listen to this thing yapping at me the whole run. In the past I've tried playing around with these kind of workout features, and just found them too inflexible. I wish they'd use some sort of averaging algorithm in order to determine when to scream at you, as opposed to the instantaneous HR.
Anyhow, I stopped the workout, but that of course screwed up the whole standard I follow of autolapping every mile. So it ended up being about a 1/3 of a mile off on every autolap. Not that big a deal, really - just annoying.
So then once I got off workout mode, I was cruising along pretty decently, but it didn't take long for me to start whether I really had the stamina to keep up the pace. I was hovering around the 8 min/mile mark and a HR of 160 for most of the time - which I was happy about because I've certainly sustained that HR (or higher) for distances longer than this run - however I didn't know whether my mind was playing tricks on me with regards to endurance, or whether I was actually exerting myself more than I should have. At around the 5 mile mark, I pretty much had my answer - I was starting to feel the effects of pushing things, and I knew I was only halfway done. Also, most of that first five miles is relatively downhill - not a whole lot, but I knew the last half was going to be slightly uphill. It was at this point that I realized not bringing gatorade or at least water was probably a mistake. As the next three mile wore on, the rate of exhaustion grew as well. By the time I hit mile eight, I had spent a few miles in the high 160's for HR, and was feeling pretty cooked. I slowed up a bit to recover, thinking maybe I'd treat the rest of the run as an interval workout, but I couldn't really even muster up the energy to do that. I decided that this workout was done, and I'd slow up and give myself a nice and long cooldown. If the run was somewhat of a fail, I didn't want it to spill over via soreness and tightness.
I'm hoping that in the next week or so, I can find a chance to do that loop again, but I'll bring gatorade with me. I'd be interested to see what difference in makes - I feel like it'd make a significant one, but I'm also basing that assumption on results from a couple-few months ago, when I had been better about keeping up with running 3x per week.
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