SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email updates. Thanks for visiting!

My 5k run was slow today and involved a lot of walking to keep below my 153bpm recovery ceiling.

Yet more ego adjustment.

This reminds me a lot of when I started running for the first time. I’d read Hal Higdon’s Beginner’s Running Guide while on holiday in Queenstown, NZ and that got me psyched to get started, unfortunately I was a pack-a-day smoker so starting out was slow going. That book advised me to walk a bit then run a bit then walk a bit… that was pretty good advice and within a couple of weeks I was running 30 minutes continuously.

Anyway, top tip for people starting out… run early in the morning or late at night when it is dark and there are fewer people about to point and laugh

Link to index of all articles in the heart rate training series

Ah… the glorious rest day
I did walk to work and play some squash though… neither of those count as exercise, the former was a pleasant stroll and the latter was fun.

This morning I clocked a 63 resting heart rate to add to the 60 I collected on Monday. I should have a pretty good idea of my average resting heart rate by the end of the week.

The day off has given me a chance to think about what I want to get out of these next 16 weeks and it isn’t really what I thought it would be. Of course I want to get fitter and I wouldn’t mind losing a bit of weight but that’s not what I really, really, want.

What I’d like is to manage to put my training into the background.

Usually when I start a new training program, of any sort, I obsess over it and become very impatient for results. Results never show up immediately and that frustrates me. I’ve never learned to trust the program and just show up every day it calls for.

So, that’s the goal here: just show up, for 16 weeks, and see what happens.

Perhaps writing about my experiences and learnings will help with that. I’ve found in the past that I was most successful as a runner when I kept a log of my exercises so that when I did become impatient I could look back and see that, yes, I really was improving.

Tomorrow is a 5km(3mi) 70% “recovery” run.

Link to index of all articles in the heart rate training series

Well, I’ve just returned from my first 5km(3mi) run with the heart rate monitor (HRM). I’d been advised by the book and by Monica that it would be embarrassingly slow and they were right, it was.

To stick below my recovery ceiling of 153 I had to walk a few times, any time there way a slight incline, and run as slow as I could. Even then I often caught myself nudging up and over 153.

I was passed by pretty much every runner in the park.

This is not an ego boost but I’m going to trust the program and show up. I’ll give it the full 16 weeks.

Link to the introduction to this series.

Link to index of all articles in the heart rate training series

I’ve not run for a while and I want to get back into it so tomorrow morning I’m starting again.

Monica had great success a couple of years ago using the training technique John L. Parker Jr. describes in his book Heart Rate Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot. While I loath the title of this book (and Dummies books and anything else that makes you admit stupidity prior to buying the book) it does come highly recommended.

So, armed with this book and M’s basic heart rate monitor I’m going to start this series about my adventures in heart rate training.

The idea with HRM training is that you can use the HRM to regulate fast and slow training days, alternating hard days with slow days, using the HRM as the arbiter of what is hard and what is slow. That means all running sessions are listed with a target heart rate as a percentage of maximum heart rate.

I happen to know, from previous HRM usage, that my max heart rate is 189 and later in the series I’ll re-evaluate that using a method from the book. I didn’t know my resting heart rate.

The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was strap on the heart rate monitor (HRM) and take my resting heart rate… no, I didn’t get out of bed or even sit up. The goal is to take a measurement of heart rate at its lowest or closest to perfect rest.

My resting heart rate was 60. I’ll take the measurement again tomorrow and start to get an average. Resting heart rate can vary day to day based on stress level, illness, quality of sleep or any number of other things so taking a few readings is handy to get rid of any outlier readings.

The book has a number of programs for novice through competitive athlete. I’ll be following the suggested scratch novice schedule. It is designed to get runners who haven’t run for a while up to the point where they can start one of the 12 week training programs.

I’m starting tomorrow with a 5k(3mi) run below the 70% recovery ceiling. The formula for working out what that means in beats per minute is:

(Max Heart Rate - Resting Heart Rate) x 0.7 + Resting Heart Rate

or

(189 - 60) * 0.7 + 60 = 150

So I’ll be trying to stay around or a bit under that.

I’ll let you know how it goes but I believe that these recovery ceiling runs are supposed to be embarrassingly slow.

Link to Heart Monitor Training at Amazon.com

Link to Polar monitors at Amazon.com

Link to index of all articles in the heart rate training series