Week #3 Session #1

This week the intervals will all be the same:  two 90 second runs and two 3 minute runs, interspersed with walking to total 30 minutes.  That adds up to just 9 minutes of running.  "How hard can this be?", I thought.  "This is progressing really slowly."

Well, it turns out running three minutes solid was quite a bit more of a challenge than I thought it would be. I'm upping the pace slightly, again, to 5.5 mph.  This is because I've done the math about how long it will take me to go 3.11 miles, and I've compared to the actual finishing times from last year's race on this course.  The pace at which I've been jogging is pretty much some people's walk.  I simply want to finish, not set any records, but I've got to finish no slower than the worst one last year!  So with the longer interval, and the faster pace, during my jogging intervals my heart rate got above 150 bpm. This is very fast, but fine for interval training.  It just shows I'm pushing. And it also means I should keep wearing the monitor, and back off it goes a lot higher.

Back when heart rate monitors first became widely available for use in training, the standard formula was that one's maximum heart rate is 220 beats per minute minus your age.  Training should take place at about 85% of that (140 bpm for me), and intervals should push higher, but for short periods. Now, the science of heart rates knows there is really wide variability and so there are various calculators out there on the web that consider many other factors besides age.  I know a couple of things about my heart rate - it may actually go higher than the standard formula indicates. I'm guessing this not only from my observations in my training, but also from the time I had intensive medical screening for heart problems, after my sister died young from undiagnosed heart problems. I had the nuclear stress test, and was running flat out for a long time at an extreme slope before the techs were convinced I was done (and this at a time I wasn't in good condition - I stopped doing any training until I finished the screening). I also know my resting heart rate can be really low. I have an iphone app that uses the built in camera to measure it from my finger and I get lovely low numbers when I'm sitting around.  I suspect more heart rate research is in my future, for entertainment to keep me interested in what I'm doing here.

To capture the stats:  at 30 minutes I had done 2.1 miles, for an average pace of 4.1 mph.  I went on to complete the whole 5K (3.11 miles) at a walk, since I had the time, and did it in 47.5 minutes for a pace of 3.9 mph. It turns out these miles per hour numbers are not very sensitive to changes in pace (as you can see) and so runners more often use minutes per mile as their pace.  I averaged 14.3 minutes per mile for the first 30 minutes and 15.3 minutes per mile over the whole 5K.