41 days

We only did a 4mk walk yesterday in anticipation of the race this morning. So yesterday's graph is pretty boring, but I'll include Wednesday's graph which is a bit more interesting. Refer back to this post. You can see the three 800m intervals and that some of the way through the last one I chickened out for a minute before continueing. I think my muscles are conditioned to expect me to stop after about 1min and 4mins of continuous running is a stretch at the moment. So we'll see how this goes.

As for this mornings race/training run, it was pretty good, but I'm pretty tired now. We did 14, turning around at the 8km mark to run back to the 7km mark and again from the 9km mark to the 8km, much to the dismay of many of the other runners and walkers, by that stage. Everyone tried to tell us that we were running the wrong way, so I replied that I'd forgotten to take coke at the last water stop :P.

You can see that my heart rate varies quite well between the top and bottom values, however I'm finding this method of control quite frustrating as well. As I warm up, or get more tired, or walk up hills I have a hard time getting my heart rate to recover. It was originally set to restart the intervals when I got to 95bpm, but after 4km this proved REALLY annoying so I stopped and set it to 98bpm which worked a bit better, but especially when walking uphill it was difficult to get it down to that. I'll have to push it up to about 103bpm I think. On the upper end I found that setting the limit to 132bpm was still too low, and I think I'll want to set it to about 140 in future.

Another option I will consider is to run for longer intervals, say 4min, and then have a heart rate determined recovery period. That means I'll always run for 4min at a time and then walk till my heart rate has recovered. I'll experiment with this next week sometime I guess.

We also tried out using the Goo sachets, which seemed to have kept me in energy and weren't TOO disgusting. I don't really enjoy the texture of these gels in your mouth, but I think they may be worth using.

Looking at the pace today just under 7:30min per km, I think this could have been a sub 70min 10km especially considering that I didn't feel like I was pushing at any time. I stopped when I was tired and probably stopped for a lot longer than I needed to, trying to make my monitor happy. I think this could have been done a lot faster. I'm not sure about sub 70mins yet, but I think it's looking that way for the 10.

What is a little concerning is my heartrate at the end of the run. I wanted to gently run the last km, I now I can run 800m continuously, so I didn't see the harm. By this stage I was no longer following the monitor as it was too difficult to get my heartrate under 100bpm, so I was starting to run again once it was at about 105. Not to mention that the last km of this race is almost contunuously downhill and when it's not downhill it's the finishing lap on a cricket pitch. So I didn't see the harm, but my heart complained, and this time I can't blame it on my running partner's watch because she was a good 2m away, so obviously there are still a few issues inside, but on the whole I'm still feeling much stronger at the moment.

My legs are more sore than usual, but I think thats due to the longer duration of running at one stretch. It should go away as I start to try and run for longer and longer intervals. Have a lekker weekend, me I'm gonna take the next 48 hours till Mondays run to chill and do as little as possible!! :)