The alarm was screaming at me this morning as I came to. Late night last night.

Groggy, unmotivated, I got up and dressed and complained to M that it would be cold and that I was tired and about how much I didn’t want to run… yeah, I know… quit your bitchin’.

Dressed in a hat, full thermals and a windbreaker (more to ward off my mental aversion to cold than because it was actually cold) I hit the road.

To my surprise everything went fairly well.

It was cold because the sky was clear so dawn was pretty and the park was at her best.

Most importantly, I ran (well, jogged) far more consistently and below the 153 recovery rate. I still walked up the hill at the park but things are definitely improving already.

Some thoughts:

• If you hate getting out into the cold just pile on as many clothes as you think you’ll need to be warm. It is better to get out and overheat than it is to not get out of the house at all.
• This is the third run week and already improvement.
• I started this program on Tuesday when I decided I wanted to get going, the printed program actually starts on a Monday but I didn’t use that as an excuse to put it off for the following Monday.

Monica pointed out that it looks like Get Fit Slowly is thinking about heart rate too and particularly in relation to fat burning. He concludes that for fat burning heart rate doesn’t matter and that you should train at the highest intensity possible. If fat loss is all you’re looking for that may be the case. There’s a great comment from greenman2001 below that:

Atheletes use heart rate for very different purposes than dieters. “Low and slow” is the way endurance atheletes build endurance — a sustained, low heart rate enables the body to grow more blood vessels into muscles (including the heart) to keep them functioning during sustained exercise. This is why slow exercise, like walking, is encouraged after a heart attack: it helps the heart to grow new blood vessels to replace those damaged and killed during the heart attack.

Some housekeeping: I’m now through the first week of the program and I’ve got a couple of rest days coming up. I’ll not be blogging rest days or necessarily every day that I run unless I feel like something interesting happens or I read something interesting about heart training.

Link to index for this series.

Related posts:

1. Heart rate training day 2: trust the system and just show up
2. Heart rate training: index
3. Heart rate training day 7: a 5km jog
4. Heart rate training
5. Heart rate training day 1

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