More slow running

on Monday, December 4, 2006 at 7:25 PM

Did 37 miles last week, all at recovery pace trying to keep the HR below 150. Did a little over 9 miles each on Tuesday and Thursday, did 6 miles on Saturday and did a 13 mile long run yesterday. Weather was pretty good. Last Thursday was downright balmy when I ran outside in shorts and a t-shirt for what will probably be the last time this year.

I'm going to try and track how much I improve running slow. Each week, I will run three laps around a local track trying to keep my HR at just under 150 and figure out what my avg pace was. During my long run this week, I did it 3 times and generated this neat graph of pace vs. HR. (I finally get to use my engineering graphing skills). pretty good correlation between the three paces. Don't know how extrapolatable it is, but if I plug in my recent marathon pace, I get a HR of 170 which is just about right of what it should be, so maybe it's a good predictor. Anyways, it predicts a pace of 9:06 at 150. I was hoping to get that down to 8:30, but that seems like too much of a stretch in 2 months. I will be happy if I can get it to 8:45.

It's also about time for me to donate blood again. I try to do it twice a year. The last time I did it, my runs sucked for about 2-3 weeks. If I do it this week, I should be recovered in time for the new year.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good for you. I'm finding it hard to get out there. Actually, I think the recent warm weather really didn't help. I'd rather winter come and then I'd have to deal with the winter running..

Sonia said...

Donating blood is a great gesture =)

At least you'll know why some of the next few runs might not go as well as you want!! When I saw your excel graph I was like... omg this is the engineer in him taking over! lol

Have a good week.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the reminder I need to donate blood as well. Perhaps I should wait for the the rum to be filtered out first though.

I am loving your little Maf experiment. The one thing I did not like about the maf method is to really see results you have to run really really big miles. How high are you going to go?

SRR said...

Ya' know...they never want my blood. I wonder why? hmmmm...

Arcane said...

Bob,

I'm not sure how much mileage. I was hoping to go till the end of January where I hopefully would have accumulated 200 miles, but I'm not sure I'll be able to get there.

temp