Catch Up Time!

Well - the weekend went well, and is documented elsewhere, so I won't give any more details here. Suffice to say that camping there the night before didn't exactly go well, and I started TW feeling knackered - which isn't good when you're going to be up all the next night!

I took Monday off to recover, and most of Tuesday, with a gentle swim midway through the day, although that ran into a family session which made it hard work to swim amongst the assorted pool furniture and polystyrene crocdiles and stuff!

Then last night I ran the Nonsuch six route, but got a bit of the ball of the foot pain again using the Kayanos, so this morning I ran it again using 2100s, which felt odd at first but I think I settled into them okay so they didn't give me any problems with the foot. Something to think about.

Both runs were odd - rather than a few quick miles and then a sudden slowing, I did find it harder to keep my heart rate down, and even had to walk in the first mile both times. Admittedly that was on uphills, but my HR just seemed four or five bpm higher for the same effort this time! Here's the figures - I forgot to press stop on the first one so there's several minutes of me walking around at home!

18/7/06

19/7/06

The odd thing is that although the first half was distinctly slower than the sessions last week, the second half is at much the same pace, so overall it's a far more even pace. I'm still coming in slightly under eleven min/mile though - which is pretty crap, and does not bode well. Apparently this is probably fat burning, and suggests I'm not very good at it! Then again - isn't fat burning what happens when you hit the wall, which is supposed to be a bad thing!

In theory getting better at this will make me a better endurance athlete, as there's only so much glycogen in the body, but it could be a long slow process. At the moment I find it very frustrating having to stop as the HR goes up. I think I might once a month find a track and just run a few kilometres to see what my time is at 140bpm on a completely flat route - as slight hills make such adifference that it's very hard to see how I'm doing comparing one mile to another. Mile five has several uphill bits that will explain the slightly slower pace.