A few weeks ago, I was in the lunch room at work, and one of the operations people came in and said he heard that I run marathons. I corrected him and told him I've run one marathon, but we got to talking and it turns out he recently signed up for a marathon in late May and had been training for it. We ended up deciding that since he had been running with another guy from work over the previous couple weeks - that we should all run together a couple times per week. 'Perfect!', I thought - this way I can get some extra miles in.
Unfortunately, right around this time, he started feeling the effects of going from running ~15 miles per week (3 days a week for 5 miles) to more like 30-35 miles per week in the span of only two weeks. And by 'feeling the effects', I mean he got himself injured, and had to lay off for a couple weeks, and then start to build back up. The funniest part of the whole story was that he was telling me that his hip had been tender - but not on the surface - deep within the hip. Within about 30 minutesr, I sent him a link that described the symptoms and rehab steps for the piriformis, and his reply was 'holy shit - thats what I have!' So he started stretching based on the suggested stretches, and it started getting better. Nothing like seat of the pants (no pun intended) non professional diagnosis of a running injury.
Anyway, today our schedules converged, and we actually had a whole group of four of us that headed out. As it turned out, one of the guys had only been doing like three miles a couple times a week - and about two miles in, he opted to turn back because his knee was bothering him. The rest of us forged on. It was a different six mile loop - but effectively the same in terms of terrain - two miles of climbing, then some downhill. The downhill on this one was more aggressive, but then it was fairly flat for the last 2.5 miles or so.
Right away, I knew we were going at a faster pace than I wanted. Just about any time I looked at my watch, we were doing something in the low 8's, and often I saw my HR in the mid 150's or high - which I wasn't too happy about, but I guess the tiny little bit of macho I have in my head overruled the much larger mass of sanity I possess, and decided to suck it up. So it was with pretty large surprise that when I looked at the data, my avg HR was only 147, and that while I did go over 160 a couple times, the HR came back down quickly - so I wasn't at that rate for very long. Probably mostly related to when I might have been engaged in the talking side of conversation.
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