Building from the ground up and running with a HR monitor

10^th June

I have put any thoughts of running the Dublin marathon to the back of my mind for the moment and will just concentrate on building from the ground up. In otherwords spend 4 weeks running slowly and surely. I will be paying a lot of attention to the HR monitor. Nothing fast and nothing spectacular. In fact everything from on till end of the month is slow, slow, slow. This is of course will be highly frustrating at times as i will be comparing very slow jogs to what i could manage when at peak training. Of particular interest will be my long runs. Long in this case no more than 8-10 miles.

As I said Dublin will be put to the back of my mind. If pace and HR improves then it might be back on the agenda but if not that’s ok too. I do have the Connemara marathon or ultra lined up next April so no panic there with a possible another crack off a marathon PB later next year.

Did 4 painful miles on Tuesday and Thursday. The effort wasn’t just physical but mental too. Pace was in the 9.15 area with a high HR 146 and a whooping 155 respectively. By Friday morning though I still felt enthused enough to attempt a 8 mile recovery jog  on a out and back course in Charleville town. I preset the garmin’s alarm to beep if the Hr strayed into high readings in this case 155 plus. Therefore the whole run was one of slow jogging punctuated by bouts of walking if the alarm sounded off. The walking enabled the HR to drop to under 150 before I went off jogging again. Running all out would have spelt doom for any chance of recovery. Completed the 8 miles in 9.30 pace with a Hr of 150. The pace was still very slow and the HR too high for my liking. Ideally I would favour a long run pace of 8.45 with average Hr of 145 or less but at the moment i will have to stick with it. Will try another 8 mile next week and I hope to see a improvement. Saturday morning i tagged another 4 miles up on the legs -144 Hr @ 9.35 pace. Mileage for week 20 miles

18^th June

Progress has been rather slow and painful at the moment. Sometimes it goes that way I guess. Usually a week after a marathon i tend to able to up the base mileage pretty quickly but this time things are different. Daniels and Pftizinger swear that patience and running according to ones recovery Hr is the key to a successful comeback so I’m giving myself 4 weeks recovery and see where I stand after that. Unfortunately that means no races and no long runs with the club at the weekends. I hope to ease into club training on Thursday with the less intensive workouts.if anything I hate to miss up on the social interaction associated with club running. At best I am a infrequent attendee so it’s no harm to pop in now and again. Anyway 3 miles at 10.30 pace. Hr 138. Resting heart is now 54 BPM, around 4 beats lower than last week but still way off my low of 45 BPM.

Anyway based on my ideal resting HR (50 BPM), my max HR (180-185) I try to run at the following intensities. Races don’t count as they are run as all out efforts but the below intensities are very instructive for me in particular the figures for  recovery and LSR’s. Paying more attention to these when training for Cork 2013 might have helped me. I see a lot of sub 3 runners (2hr55 to 2hrs58) are able to to run recovery runs at a Hr of 131 and still maintain a pace of under 8 minutes a mile. Again we will see how it goes. Just concentrating on recovery, building base and getting the hunger back.

	Heart rate reserve%	Hr  training rate	My ideal target pace (mis/sec)
VO2 max	91-94	170-171	6mins40secs
Lactate Threshold	77-78	148-163	7mins to7.15
Marathon pace	73-84	142-157	7.40 to 7.50
LSR pace	65-78	131-150	8.30 to 9.00
General Aerobic	62-75	127-145	7.45 to 8.05
Recovery pace	Less than 70	138 or less	9.30 to 10.30