I am thinking of renaming this blog "A Life In Lycra"! What with training on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, and yesterday's marathon training seminar, I seem to be spending more time in running gear than in normal clothes.
Tuesday saw a 4.8 mile "easy" run round Dalgety Bay. This route was partly road running and partly along the beautiful Fife Coastal Path. However, I think I may have let my foot fall badly at some point, because I had a few twinges for the next couple of days.
My next run was Thursday. This time, I started off trying to keep my pace solidly in the aerobic heart rate zone. That was undoubtedly an interesting experience; in order to do that I had to keep myself to around an 11:30 minutes per mile pace. I lasted with that for the first half of the run, then gave up and went at a more normal pace for the second half. I later learned that the technique was all wrong, and that I should only be looking for a specific zone after about a fifteen minute warmup.
Saturday saw the marathon training session I described yesterday, where my training plan was thrown into some amount of chaos. We did a threshold training session during the day, where we ran 4 x 5-minute threshold runs with 90s jogging in between. Sadly Runkeeper failed to record the session correctly, so I am going to be generous and give myself three miles for that effort and make up a calorie count.
Sunday saw my first Long, Slow Run (LSR). Where my previous training plan told me that it should be 7 miles, this new plan has it as 75 minutes. Given that I am going for a target pace of approx 10:10 minutes/mile in my LSRs (which I hope I would be able to convert to 9:00/mile in the marathon), the distance-based and time-based versions come to approximately similar outcomes. But once again, Runkeeper crashed midway through the run and so the results are not as accurate as they could be.
Runkeeper is becoming something of a problem, but I do have plans for that. I believe that my (very) early birthday present should be arriving during the week - a shiny new Garmin watch. That will be useful in as much as it gives me the chance to have an immediate indication of pace that I can see whenever I want. Runkeeper's ability to report your pace every quarter mile is great, but the results are erratic. If it is true that for one quarter mile that my pace is "eleven minutes and thirty seconds per mile", and the next my pace is "seven minutes and fifteen seconds per mile", I would have thought that I would notice the difference in effort. But no, I think it was just some dodgy estimation by the app.
Hey, it's free, it seems mean to complain, but I am looking forward to using the Garmin!
Anyway, as I sit typing up this blog I am a little concerned that my muscles feel a little tired, even a couple of dull aches. But then I plotted my route into Endomondo and looked at the distances... After a nine mile run I reckon I've got a right to be a little achey :-)
06-12 Feb 2012
| Number of runs | Four |
| Links | - Tuesday - 4.79 miles (563 cal) - Thursday - 3.74 miles (440 cal) - Saturday - 3.00 miles (350 cal) estimated - Sunday - 9.00 miles (1060 cal) estimated |
| Total mileage this week | 20.53 miles |
| Calories burned this week | 2413 |
| Total mileage since start | 66.16 miles |
| Calories burned since start | 6364 |
| Sunday morning weight | (Forgot to weigh myself) |
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