When I’ve done these longer workouts in the past, they’ve been on the treadmill. And to be honest, I’d have to run 2-3 of these to get down to that kind of pace for that long of a distance. Hence, my apprehension heading into this workout. To makes things more interested I basically ran 2 loops of the Minnesota Masters 15K (or whatever it’s being called now). The layout of this course meant miles 1 and 4 would have rather significant up hills, 2 and 5 would be down and 3 and 6 would be mostly flat.
I wore both my Garmin and my HRM for this workout (yes, I’m getting all techie). While I don’t have the exact info handy, here’s what I remember; 6:54, 6:40ish, 6:22 (oops), 6:33, 6:35, 6:36, which equals 39:40ish. It took about 2 miles to get my HR up to 175. I thought I’d need to be around 180 to run 6:36 pace, but I couldn’t even get that high.
Finally, after 3 miles I was able to relax more, rather than worry about my pace and my HR. By that time I figured I would be able to make it the entire 6 miles at the required effort – without my heart exploding.
Quote of the day;
“Why no ‘On top of the world’, why no ‘Finally, the goal after years of struggle’? The reason has to be that I always thought I was capable of more. So even 3:56 by then didn’t seem like that much to celebrate. God, I want to go back and operate that body with a fifty-year-old head! It was always my head that set me back.” – Dave Wilborn, upon reviewing his logbook years later and seeing only names and times after he ran 3:56.2 in a race where Jim Ryun set a WR of 3:51.1
3 comments:
Haven't commented or talked to you in a bit but I had to say something. It seems like you've been a little worried about using technology lately with your training or maybe it just comes off that way. I think it's just using the tools that are available.
You're doing the right thing following the Daniels plan. It probably works for a wide range of runners but I think it's great for people running in the 40-80 MPW rage especially since we're mostly running on our own so it's up to us to stay on track as far as pacing, intervals, rest, etc. VDOT is great and if you ever want to see some VDOT's down the tenth, I have the tables. Yes, it goes that far. And if you didn't know that, then you can't really be that techie after all so its all good.
I've been using the Daniels formula, adjusted for my relatively low mileage, for a couple years now. It really works well with the Garmin, since the workouts are all based on pace, not heart rate.
I've always noticed that my heart rate is not a great indicator of pace or effort on my faster runs, especially when trying to differentiate between threshold and VO2 max kinds of workouts. I do like heart rate for the easy runs though, as a heart rate upper limit seems to do a better job keeping things easy than a pace would.
Adam, I can see how HR wouldn't be a good indicator for VO2 max workouts.
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