Saturday, January 3, 2009

Changes

Pigdog commenter Anonymous had some serious advice for me after my wrapup post. For a while, Anonymous has pointed out the flaws in my training. Of course, he's probably onto something. I've tended to do runs too hard too often. My injury recovery plan, if you can call it that, was to mostly hope it went away. So maybe it is time to make changes. The first one: a heart-rate monitor. I used to think these were for old people so they don't drop dead jogging around the park. I realize I need help figuring out my training pace. For the most part, I don't think I trained too fast in the leadup to Philly. But I let myself slip in October, and I paid the price. A HRM should help keep me in check. Right now, I need to get my Achilles healthy. I stopped myself from running yesterday because it was sore. I'll go out today for a couple easy miles. I'm running at about 8-8:15 pace, nothing too strenuous. It will be interesting to see what the HRM has to say about what's an easy pace for me. I have a feeling it will be very slow. We'll see.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Anonymous is a jerk.

JPS said...

I think you'll be surprised at what you see on the HRM. They key is knowing what your zones are, your max, etc. Until you can do any kind of threshold test you'll probably have to gauge things based on feel or the old less-than-accurate formulas (age-related). But it's still always surprising at how much work I'm doing when I think it's an easy pace.

nyflygirl said...

I felt using the HRM really helped my training in 2008-helped me keep my easy days easy. And was very encouraging to see things like my hopeful marathon pace fall into the easy zone in the 2nd half of training :)

runner-grrl said...

I'm fascinated by the progression of the "Anonymous" comment to this. Really interested in how the HRM training is going. It didn't sound like you were pushing your easy runs too much, but without the HRM, RPE might not be enough. So, post already :-). --Alex (aka run350 on twitter)