Be Still My Beating Heart

My week of relatively easy running after the Detroit half-marathon ended yesterday with.....a dispiriting fizzle.

On the books was a 2-hour run with my heart rate under 150 beats per minute. My right hamstring was sore, so I was happy this one was to be so easy. But sometimes "easy" isn't "simple." From the beginning, my heart rate refused to stay below 150 if I was doing anything that resembled jogging. I'd run a few steps, the heart would zip up to 160 or above (regardless of whether I was going up, going down or running flat), I'd slow to a walk, the heart rate would plunge back into the 120s.....and this went on for the whole two hours. There was no shuffle that wasn't a walk that didn't provoke the 160-plus reaction. Yet I couldn't walk fast enough to keep it in the 130s or 140s.

Here's what it looked like. Not fun.

At first I thought it was a problem with my Garmin heart rate strap (I use the Forerunner 210). Often when I start a run, my monitor will show impossibly high readings (like in the 180s or even over 200) when I'm barely out of the 11-minutes-a-mile range. Since this is a known problem with Garmin heart rate straps, I tend to ignore it, and it smooths out. But when it never settled down yesterday as it usually does, it became impossible to ignore....and though I may be wrong, I decided to trust it, decided that my body just didn't want to run much yesterday and did A LOT of walking.

Now I'm second-guessing that and wondering if it wasn't the watch or the strap after all. I'm going to try some of the tricks I've read online for fixing this problem, and we'll see how tomorrow's easy run goes.

Either way, this isn't exactly how I hoped to launch the "marathon-specific" portion of this run-up to the California International Marathon. I guess I was due a return to earth after last weekend's high. If this is the worst thing that happens to me over the next five weeks, I'll be grateful!

Has anyone else had problems with your Garmin heart rate monitor? Any advice?

A Month and a Day

The Detroit International Half-Marathon (called "international" because the course loops into Canada) is in one month and one day. I can hardly believe it. I'm going to race again, and soon.

Usually when I train for a half-marathon I like to have at least one 15-miler under my belt. I'm not sure that's going to happen this time. As of right now, I haven't run more than 8 miles at once.

This makes me nervous enough that I asked Darren if he thought it was really a good idea for me to do this race. After all, the California International Marathon six weeks later is my real goal race. I don't want to do anything to distract from that fact, and if staying home and just going for a longer run the weekend of the half would serve me better, I wanted him to know I was willing to forgo the race. Darren, however, thinks doing the half is a good idea. He said it will be a good gauge of my fitness for CIM.

This is exciting to me because not only does he think I'll be ready for it (at least on some level), his answer implies he will want me to actually race it, and not just treat it like a training run. As we get closer, I know he'll share details of what he thinks my pace and race strategy should be. Until then, I just have to keep my faith in him (the man knows whereof he speaks!)...and of course execute the workouts he gives me.

These workouts are getting harder!

Two weeks ago I had my first "all-running, no-recumbent bike" week, and there's been no looking back. My training now features six days in a row of running, with a day totally off on Sunday. Tomorrow I have a real gut-buster of a combo hill-and-fartlek workout. Wednesday I have a mid-week semi-long run. And on Saturday I have a 90-minute progression run that I'm hoping will be my first 9-miler in a long time. All the workouts have precise instructions on heart rate ranges. So far I'm finding this heart-based training much easier to stick with than pace-based training has been for me in the past. And I try not to despair seeing how S-L-O-W I must go to keep my heart rate down for the easy runs.

I may not be doing any 15-milers, but I'm truly enjoying this training and feeling good. I just hope it's "half-marathon-in-a-month" good!

Labor Day Virtual 5 Mile

Laura at Mommy Run Fast is hosting a virtual 5- or 10-mile Labor Day Race this weekend. I signed up early for the five, knowing I'd be assigned at least that distance for the weekend's long run.

Turns out Darren gave me 70 minutes with 20 tempo-paced minutes in the middle, more than enough time for the virtual race and a "warm-up" and "cool-down" mile on either side of it. I wasn't able to truly race the full five, as Darren wanted me to keep my heart rate slow and easy for the first 30 minutes and the last 20....but I was able to speed up and have fun with that middle 20 minutes!

My body clock has really gotten used to getting up early. Even without setting an alarm, I was ready to go at 6:15 a.m. yesterday. The weather was beautiful, cool and slightly cloudy, but not so cloudy that I couldn't see the blue moon setting over the mountains to the west. I had decided to test my body out on a full concrete course for this one. After all, my two scheduled races in Detroit and Sacramento will be all asphalt/concrete affairs and I need to start getting used to that, as well as to having some hills to contend with.

Keeping my heart rate below 150 for the first 30 minutes proved easy enough. I concentrated on slowing on the uphills and speeding up on the downhills. It did touch 150 at the top of a long but gradual hill, but then quickly fell back to 126 as I went down the other side. All of this, and I was able to gradually increase the pace while still staying "easy." Score!

Mile One: 10:24 (the warm-up mile for the virtual race)
Mile Two: 10:08 (mile one of the virtual race)
Mile Three: 9:37 (mile two of the virtual race)

At 30 minutes on the dot, I picked up the pace to begin my 20 tempo minutes. For this part of the run, Darren had instructed me to keep my heart rate between 155 and 166. Since I was on a downhill at this point, I had trouble getting it above 155, so I took a detour that I knew would lead me up again. After that hill, I had no problem staying in the tempo heart-rate range. The last several minutes of it saw rates in the 160s but I never got above 166.

Mile Four: 8:28 (mile three of the virtual race)
Mile Five: 7:56 (mile four of the virtual race)

Then came the hard part: the cool-down. During this phase, I was once again supposed to keep my heart rate below 150. I had to slow my pace notably to achieve this, and even so it took me a good minute and a quarter to be able to stay down there. Mile Seven felt SO slow.

After a while, though, my pulse steadied, and I could run without checking in so much.

Mile Six: 9:38 (mile five of the virtual race, run partly during the tempo section, partly during the cool-down; slowing down this much is NOT how I would finish if I were allowed to race for real!)

Mile Seven: 11:08 (cool-down mile)
Last Quarter-Mile: back to a 10:25 pace, heat rate safely below 150

My total time for the five-mile virtual race: 47:48
My total distance for the 70 minutes: 7.25 miles

That's more than five minutes slower than my Snowman Stampede five-mile time, set during the last race I ran before taking my injury break. But I'm happy with it because only during less than half the duration was I really trying to run fast, and one of the miles during that time was significantly faster than any of the miles I ran during the February race. Perhaps more importantly, I was able to execute my heart-rate instructions for the day to the letter.

Big thanks to Laura for hosting a fun event (and a fun way to add variety to a Saturday morning long run). Fingers crossed that I win one of her great prizes!