Running In Place

I had originally planned to run a 4 mile race on Saturday but when I got up, I just didn’t feel like it. No big drama, I just felt like I’d rather hang out at home and have coffee on the porch with my old man. And so it was.

I did sign up for a 10K next Friday evening that I am looking forward to. It’s just up the road and I will probably head to my sis’s after for a beer and a dip in the pool. Then, no races till New Haven because I have got to stop messing around so much with my 1/2 M schedule.

So. I bought an HR monitor. Evidently there was not enough minutiae in my life for me to obsess about. After two runs with it, it would appear that my “conversational pace” puts me at about 95% of Max HR. Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration but the reality was that I could not run slow enough to keep my heart rate even a bit below 80%. However, for reading more in the 90% range, my subjective feeling of effort did not feel as high as my pulse indicated - on a 1 to 10 scale, I might have given it a 7. What does it all mean?

The Max HR I was going by was the one the cardiologist gave me when I had the stress echo - which was 177. However, at one point when I was doing some hill repeats, my HR showed 181. If I were to do the 220 minus age formula, it would give a Max HR of 182 (now don’t be going and doing any fancy math to figure out how old I am!). So was the doc wrong? If it was the fault of the monitor, I would expect it to miss beats, not add extra ones. Is it possible that after a year my heart is still so inefficient? Both runs were in hot and quite humid conditions so that might have contributed - but how much? Dunno.

Anyway, I - of course - promptly ordered a book, and I’ll continue to experiment along with it. I’m thinking I’d like to incorporate heart rate training as a tool to improve. I’m thinking about next year, and I’m thinking about it being a Marathon year.

If I look back on this year, thus far - I can’t say I have any complaints. It was just about a year ago that I took my first, tentative post-injury steps. Since then, I have improved some physically, but improved much mentally. I have struggled with the fear, bordering paranoia, of re-injury - when the slightest twinge would stop me in my tracks. I have fought mightily with the expectations that got me injured in the first place - that I must run as fast and as far as everyone else, as soon as possible. But I have also set and achieved goals that would have been laughable to me 2 years ago, and find that each time that happens the next goal somehow seems to get a little more intense. I have learned a little more about that part of running that is without language - why I embrace it, or why it embraces me - and how much more of that I want to know. So when I look at what I’ve done and I look at what I’m doing - I want to do more, I want to do better. Not because I want to measure up to anyone. Only to myself.

This year I’ve run plenty of races, and am still to run a few more. I didn’t race any of them thinking about a PR, I just loved being there and being a part of them. Some people may not even call that racing. That’s ok. But when I think about next year, I do think about being a little faster and running a little longer - not because I’m a competitor or because I think that I should, but because I want to be more physically fit and more mentally tough. And the year after that - even moreso - etc & etc. But you know, I always want the running to be joyful. Sure, in the real world, not every run is what you’re going to describe as joyful - but I always want the essence to be there no matter what my training goals. My challenge will be to not get caught up in the machinations to the point where I forget that. For a person who can easily spend 20 minutes pinning her race bib on just right, you bet it’ll be a challenge!

So those are the things I’ve been thinking about.