Easy Runs At My Pace

After getting my HRM I wanted to do what the books and websites said, that is keep my heart rate under a certain level when running. I ran 4 easy/long runs with my average heart rate right around 140, my average pace for those runs was pretty close to 11:30 per mile. I felt like I could run forever at that pace and hardly felt like I had done anything once I finished. In fact it was really hard to run that slow, I had to walk occasionally to keep my heart rate as low as it should be. I tried doing that for awhile but it have a couple races coming up that I want to do decent in and I don't feel running that slow will help me with that.

I've ran one long run and one easy run since then by what I felt was an easy pace. I used the conversation test. Basically that is if I can carry on a conversation without having to pause frequently to catch my breath then I'm going about the right pace. (I get strange looks when I test that out since I run by myself.) My pace for both those was right around 10:20 a mile. My average heart rate for the easy 2 mile run was 151 and 161 for the 4 mile long run. Those runs felt so much better, I felt like I actually worked out a little bit (got a tiny bit of that runner's high). I still felt like I could run for a very long time too.

My long run cemented the fact that my aerobic base sucks (sitting on your ass for 7 years will do that). I averaged a heart rate of 150 for the first half of it, but the second half was a different story. The average for it half was 169, with 173 being the highest that I saw. I kept a pretty even pace the whole time so naturally my heart rate would be higher for the second half, but I didn't expect it to be that much higher. So after these upcoming races I'm going to work on building my aerobic base up for the rest of the year (it could be a long six months). I'll layout my whole training plan in a later post. That will give me an excellent base to build some speed on in 2008 (at least that's my hope anyway).