Day 21

Today Total: 10k
Week Total: 52k
Month Total: 52k
Year Total: 1019k

As has been customary upon each 7th day - a report on The Great Heartrate Experiment - to summarise - I feel great, I haven't trained longer or been faster for quite a few summers.

As an example, during Wednesday I ran for an hour @ 75%, rode the bike for an hour @ < 75% and I cross trained for a further hour, most of which was > 80% - ok no biggie, 2 hours of that was relatively gentle exercise - but the sweet bit is - I then got up Thursday morning and ran 10k at my half marathon PB pace and felt fantastic! NB whilst this is not race pace for a 10k it is certainly my fastest 10k in training for a mighty long time.

I have also trained between 50 minutes & 3 hours on 22 of the last 23 days - now 2P of old never even came close to that! My biggest dilemma these days is finding enough time to train.

So yeah - I think there is something to this. To be fair - I'm not saying that the low heartrate stuff is solely responsible. If you've been paying attention you would have noticed I've  also been working the middle and the top end as well - rather I think the reality is more that it is the variety (of which for me low heartrate stuff had previously been missing) that has meant:

- less chance of overuse injuries because I'm using muscles a bit differently on different runs
- generally the impact on the body is lower because I'm not pounding the pavement hard on every run
- all energy systems across the spectrum are getting conditioned
- I've been able to up the ante on workload and pace niggle free *touching wood, rubbing lucky rabbits foot, and throwing salt over shoulder*
- I'm not getting bored and I really look forward to my faster hit outs

So to respond to a couple of comments about being patient and how do I stand running so slow?

Well to be honest at first it was a bit of a shock just how slow 75% was for me and I was highly embarrassed at running so slow - till I realised no one else gave a rats bum about it except for me! People who are running faster don't think about how slowly someone else is running - they are just chuffed that they are faster - hard to believe I know - but it turns out it's not always about me :-)

As for the patience thing, at first it was a bit of a trial, but I mentally had commited to at least 1 month of this to give it a fair go - but now I'm seeing and feeling results it has been much easier and I've been happy to stick with it.

My conclusion thus far is that I (and probably a lot of others) had previously done my easy and long runs too hard. The goal is to get back to the old pace on these runs but at a much lower heartrate - only time will tell and the experiment continues.

And so for today it was back to an easy 10k @ 141bpm. No real difference to the pace this week at the low heartrate, I suppose like most things the gains wax and wane in their progress.

Regards, Lab Rat ;-)