Week #6 - Day 2

Today's run was not so great. I had been looking forward to what the local weather forecasters were saying was a "cool front" coming in. Ha! It's just as hot as it's been the last month, with just slightly less humidty. Anyways, my big excuse for the day's poor performance was that my new heart rate monitor arrived (the Polar S120) and I was messing with it the whole time. Well, halfway into the first mile the chest strap was too loose and it was falling off. Instead of stopping to fix it, I kept running and eventually got it fitting a little better. So my first mile, despite messing with the strap, I finished in just over 8 minutes. The second mile, when everything was adjusted, I tried to stick around 145 bpm, which is about 75% of my max heart rate, and is around what I should be training at. Well, when trying to stay around that rate I was doing about a 10+ minute mile. It felt like I was crawling!

After trying to stick to a lower rate for the first three miles (which took me nearly 28 minutes!) I gave up and just ran what felt like my normal pace the last two miles, with a little extra push at the end (which actually got my heart rate up to 189, which is pretty darn close to my "estimated' max rate of 194. I finally finished my 5 miles in 45:33 (9:06.5 mle pace). That's almost 3 minutes more than last week's day 2 run. Not exactly what I was hoping for.

So, in the coming days I'm going to try to read up on all of this heart rate stuff and how to incorporate it into one's training. I've been seemingly fine doing what I've been doing the past 6 weeks, so I don't think I should suddenly drop my pace just because of what a book or website says (though I'm sure they know much better than I). But we'll see. If you go to 10 different sites and look at their marathon training programs, you'll get 10 totally different routines. But when it comes to this heart rate stuff, it's pretty well agreed upon. But at this point I think it requires more research before I go and change everything up.