Heart Rate Training

This year has been a year focused solely on running and making improvements to speed- mainly to reduce the crazy race spending from last year. Piece of cake, right? After all it's only ONE sport instead of THREE. My husband and I started off training together at the same pace. I knew he would soon feel the need to pick up the pace, and if you want to get faster at running, you should be running fast- or at least I thought that's what is supposed to happen.

Running has always been my weakness in Triathlon so when my husband suggested we only run this year I knew I had a lot of work ahead of me. After a few months of being left in the dust and trying to keep a fast 'tempo run' pace I started to doubt myself and my training plan...or lack of a solid plan. The loosely followed plan was to do one track workout a week (usually on Tuesday with our local triathlon club) in addition to a tempo run on Friday that consisted of a mile warm up around 10-10:30min pace followed by a faster 3-4 miles in which I tried to hang on to a 9:20 pace. With my fastest 5k being around 28 minutes it seemed like an attainable goal. I managed to do a few of these runs but ended up beating myself up for either not reaching my average pace or having to stop and walk on subsequent runs. I felt it wasn't working for me.

After doing a little research I found a book called Run Workouts published by Velopress and figured I would give it a try. I dusted off my heart rate monitor, strapped it around my chest, and began the 10k training program. It started off with an efficiency test for a baseline of your current aerobic capabilities and ended with a 30 minute run. After that efficiency test Matt and I realized we won't be able to train together since our paces are so different for our easy runs. It took me a few days to adjust to this new slower pace while I aimed to keep my HR around 60% max. My old 'easy' pace was 10min/mi and my new pace according to my HR zone is around 11:30min/mi. Such a huge change that I was subconsciously speeding up and going back to my old pace- one that I couldn't sustain.

I'm still experimenting and it's only the second week of base mileage but I have been able to run more miles per week and am no longer beating myself up for having to slow down and/or walk. Supposedly when I do the efficiency test again in a few weeks I should be able to run faster at 60% HR max.

My running seems really slow but I hope that by taking my pace down a notch I can make leaps and bounds once the quality workouts are added. I hope...