A Passion for Running

All kinds of information from my new monitor for this Saturday’s 18-mile run. The Reader’s Digest version is that I ran 28.5 km at an average pace of 9:05 min/mile (5:42/km) and average heart rate of 160 (80% of my max).

If you are the type of person who likes to look at detailed stats (why do I think I’m talking to you Richard?), the untold story is the variation from km to km. The route Tom and I have been running is hilly. Very hilly. Most of them are not gradual hills either. The new monitor has a built-in altimeter that says there is a 70 meter/220 foot variation from the highest to lowest parts of the route. To put that into perpective, that’s the height of a 22 story building. The monitor also tells me we did 390 meters/1180 feet of ascending. I’m assuming that means straight up climbing and does not include the horizontal distances logged while running uphill. Anyway, wow. That’s a lot of climbing.

What all this meant for the run was that it’s next to impossible to maintain a consistent pace running the hills so you do your best to average it out – which we did.

In keeping with McMillan’s approach, I ran this week’s long run very differently than last week’s. You may remember last week I did not fuel and ran the 20-miler slowly. This week, I did fuel and we ran the last half at a terrific negative split and really turned it up in the last half hour.

I felt very very good yesterday and am hoping it means my experiment is working out. I have not fueled on a long run for quite some time so yesterday was a bit of a different experiment. The experiment was to see if I could still stomach gels. I had no trouble with them. That’s a good thing.

Below is lap break down (each lap is a km) of yesterday’s run. Thanks to Mike and his advice to run slowly while calibrating, the monitor now seems to be extremely accurate. Although the course is supposed to be 29km and my monitor said it was 28.5, I’m pretty confident since it was off by .25km on only two markers. It was bang-on accurate for the other 27 markers. That tells me it was probably the markers (not the monitor) that were off a bit.

In addition to the stats below, here is a little graph of the paces we ran km by km.