46 days

Today's run didn't look promising when I left work this afternoon. It rained most of the way home, which isn't that much fun on two wheels, but I got home safe. We drove to the school instead of walking the habitual kilometer there and back. It was still spitting when we got there and there were no other crazy people braving the weather...but we have a program to follow, so we ran the 2km down to the hill.

This week was 7 times up and down the hill and the times were pretty much the same as last week except we went another time up the hill. The 6.4km route took 53min (8:16min/km) this time as opposed to last weeks 49:45 for 6km (8:17min/km) so I'm getting better at this. Next week will be 8 hills for a 6.8km run.

It turned out to be a fantastic run with a light drizzle, I don't think you get better training weather.

47 days

Friday was a 5km run with a km to and from the school where I train so perhaps 7km was unwise before Saturdays long run. We'd measured out a 10km route around the eastern suburbs of Pretoria and I'm afraid to say that it seems to be impossible to find a flattish route. I don't suppose that is a bad thing as Southern Cross Drive is apparently a bit of a nightmare. Saturday morning's 2 hour run was less than pleasant. I think the 7km not more than 12hrs before and the meds that I'd taken in the morning made the run pretty tough.

I think now that my docs taken me off some of the meds I'll have to think of when to dose myself. I intend to take meds on Friday nights instead of Saturday morning, so that I haven't gone 24 hours without meds by the next morning, but also so that I am still slightly protected. Otherwise i'll continue taking them in the morning and training in the evening, this way they have worn off enough to allow me a good session.

Here is Friday's data I haven't quite worked out where the correct recovery level is and it's a bit frustrating on the uphills because my I struggle to get my heartrate down enough to start the interval again. So I'll be playing around with that.
For Saturday's run my monitor was giving trouble again so I don't have any data and simply trained according to 45sec vs 1:30 (workout/recovery) intervals. We did ran the 10km in 80min but decided we were both too tired to complete another 40min of running, so we decided to walk the last 40min, which I think was a good call.

I had a hard time this weekend deciding what to do about my faulty heartrate monitor. Mine is about 5 years old, and there are new Polar watches that do alsorts of other fancy functions, not to mention the Garmin watches that give you perfect route, speed and distance readings. However common sense prevailed :( and I settled for just getting another sensor to interface with my current watch which does the job as well as I could hope.

Anyway all counted this week was 39km! Not too shabby!

Go ahead!!!

I should be my own cardiologist :P ... everything that I thought about my current state was confirmed. My ejection fraction is up again from 42 - 46, theres no denying it now. My heart is in normal sinus rythm... explains the "normal" reaction to exercise. He thinks I'm now on too much medication because my heartrate when they took my ECG was 46bpm, so he's decreasing my dose of atenelol from 50mg bd to 50mg/d.

Basically all is good and he is happy for me to do the 2 Oceans half marathon as long as I listen to my body and just aim to finish comfortably... nothing more. Which is exactly what I planned to do :) I have entered, now I've gotta complete the next 50 days with enough training and without injury :)

50 days... todays the deciding day!

I'm going to the cardiologist today, I'm pretty sure that he'll be happy for me to continue training. Yesterday was a 30min run, which was 4km on the route I previously dubbed Hell on Tar. Well I didn't go all the way to the top yesterday because I only wanted to do 4km, but it seemed a lot less hellish. I decided to push the last little bit to the turn around point and there were no complaints from my legs. Sure it was probably ill advised but it's really nice to be able to just go faster when I wanted to. Whats more is my heartrate didn't misbehave too badly.


I set the limits up by 10bpm to 130 for my running interval and that seemed to work fine, the problem was more getting it to drop from 95bpm to 93bpm on the recovery, especially when walking uphill so I'll probably increase that a bit aswell. This is all a learning curve for me and as long as my heart remains in it's current state, I suspect I'll be playing around with these values a lot.

51 days

I think yesterday's run was arguably the most enjoyable run I've had in years. It was 6km in 45 min which is about 7:30min/km which is pretty good for me. Whats more I think I've realised why I'm feeling so strong at the moment. I think my heart has gone into sinus rythm, which I think just means it's beating like a normal heart and that I don't have arythmia. Thats just my supposition but it feels very regular and slow, and responds very well to effort. Here's another heartrate graph from yesterday....
Whats also interesting is that at the last race my heartrate didn't go above 120bpm at all, but yesterday I managed to get it to the high 130's. I think the reason is that I took my meds not an hour earlier when I ran the night race, and I usually take my meds after my night training sessions. Maybe there's a case to decrease my medication dosage aswell. Whats more, if my heart is in sinus rythm and it stays there for a year or so, I'll be able to come off the most dangerous of my medications, warfarin. I'll have to wait till tomorrow to get answers to all these questions when I visit the cardiologist.

52 Days

Yesterday was hills again, and my heartrate monitor was working. The warmup was done between 120bpm and 92bpm, this seemed to work quite well, and as soon as I started to feel my legs complaining, my heartrate got above 120 and I could walk.

We did 6 hills yesterday as you can see in the graph below. I'm pretty sure we did them faster and the overall time, including the warmup and cool down, for the 6km was 49:45 whereas last weeks 5.6km took 50:45.

I've always said that I'd listen to my body and I think I do that pretty well, so yesterday on the last hill, when I decided that I wanted to go a little bit faster there were no complaints from my body. My heartrate didn't go up significantly compared to the other hills but I was able to do the 200m uphill in 1:04 whereas all the other hills were about 1:15. It felt great to go fast, and feel power in my legs... I think this hill training once a week is doing me some good!

Whats also very good is that in the 2 or so minutes it takes to walk back to the bottom of the hill my heartrate dropped normally to about 95bmp every time!

Actually it's only 4 days!

Unless I'm really reckless and decide to go against the doctors orders, the entire result of this blog hinges on the outcome of Thursday's appointment. I'm going to see my cardiologist. I have an idea that my improvements of last year have continued, but I'm not sure. I hope what he will say is that I should do it, but just take it easy and listen to my body. But if theres been any decrease in my ejection fraction since last time then I suspect he will tell me not to do it, in which case I will have a difficult decision to make.

54 days

I tried running using my heart rate as the control for my intervals and it worked pretty successfully. There are a few things that I need to change though. First being that I set the recovery heart rate limit too low at 90bpm. It could have been 92/93bpm instead as it was a challenge to get it to go that low. My running limit could possibly be a little higher as well, but I'll leave it at 120bpm at for now while I "experiment" with this. I think there could be a difference between the response with runs in the morning where I have just taken meds and runs in the afternoon where I haven't.
If you look at the graph you'll see my heart rate jumps quite hectically, it doesn't feel any different and I should perhaps have had the presence of mind to take it manually. I think it's just atrial beats being picked up by my monitor as I exert myself harder, but this happened while walking, not running, up a slight incline. Anyway I stopped at the 2km mark, rested till it dropped to a normal rate and then continued running. It's interesting to note that the curve of the "offset cycle" still follows a recovery pattern.

This was a 4km run completed in 30:40, i did stop the counter for while I was getting my heart rate back to an acceptable rate. I would just hate this to happen in a race when it isn't really necessary for me to rest, but we'll see.

I ran 5km on Saturday morning aswell unfortunately my monitor was misbehaving again so I had to use "normal" intervals again. It took 37 mins to complete.

In the first half on February I've completed 62km of training!

57 days

Last nights Lantern Race was quite fun. With a bit of thunder keeping you awake and some lightening intermittently illuminating the path. It had been threatening to rain and a light drizzle started about half way through which was also very nice. What I didn't like was the the 5km and 10km runners and walkers started together, and there were A LOT of us! So the first 2/3km were choas, with it being impossible to get any rythm.

But as far as the running goes it was alright, I was feeling pretty tired, and maybe I'm doing too much, afterall I did 13km on Saturday, hills on Monday and now a 10km yesterday. I think it calls for less work till next week Monday.

Good news is my heart rate monitor is working happily again, so I have some more data, and it still is of the "more normal" variety. I'm very interested to hear what the cardiologist has to say tomorrow!! Some of it is attached below.
I had a thought about it last night, and that is if it behaves itself like it has been then I can try i different mode of pacing myself. At the moment I just pick a running time and a recovery time, but as you can see if you expand the graph there I have a definite recovery, so if I set myself some heartrate limits I can run until my heartrate exceeds some limit and then walk till it drops below another one. This will mean that when I'm feeling good I can run for longer without worrying about puching too hard.

59 days

Unfortunately I have no more interesting heart rate dat. Seems my monitor's battery was flat, I've had trouble with the strap before, but this time it was definitely the battery. So tomorrow I'll be back at it.

My intention had been to do 6X200m hills yesterday, but in the end, without my Polar to make sure I wasn't damaging myself, we threw in the towel at 5. Which was 1 better than last week and whats more, they were much faster. Last weeks lap times, up and down the hill were, 3:45, 3:40, 3:45 and 3:35 respectively. Yesterdays times were 3:26, 3:26, 3:23 3:41 and 3:45. Ok so the last one was slow but by that stage, I was buggered!!

So today was meant to be a short walk, but I think I'm gonna skip it, cause tomorrow is a 10km night race, should be fun.

I changed my mind

I thought that Friday's heart rate data was pretty uninteresting because it was only a walk, but after looking at it closer it is very interesting, and proves my point about how well my heart is currently responding to output demands. The route was Boys High, which takes us on a gently downhill initially, then we get to the hill I do hill training on, which is 2/300m long. Then the 5km takes you straight back down a similair hill, at the bottome of which we turn around and come back up, down the first hill and back up the gentle slope towards the end of the route.


The amazing thing to me is that that is suddenly all reflected in my HR data (2 steep hills, 2 downhills, below average hr for the gentle down slope, slightly above average hr for the gentle upslope)... which is as it should be... but still, it was only a walk!

60 days!!!

Friday was a leasurely 5km walk in 48mins as I knew I had Saturday ahead of me. Saturday, the long run, was 100min on the road. Ok so it turned out to be 107min on the road and 13km which wasn't too shabby, it was at about 8:10min/km which was in the suggested target zone and if maintained would bring me in just under the 180min mark. So I'm quite happy with that. Unfortunately my polar was giving me trouble so I have no data to show for it.

Today is more hills! Sounds like fun. I can hardly believe that it's so close! I must admit that I still haven't entered the race... and I probably should, but I'm waiting to see what the cardiologist says. I'm encouraged, but also a little concerned by my heart's sudden slow rate. For illustration I've attached some data from October, which is generally what I'm used to seeing.


You can see that what my heart currently does is more like a normal heart should behave, which is encouraging, but it's not what I'm used to and thats worrying. So I'd really like to ask a doctor whats up. Obviously my silly bit of Polar data isn't particularly accurate and the ecg and echo data that I'll get from the doctor will let me know if this means I'm better or worse. But thats in 2 weeks time, for now, I'm gonna train like I'm going.