It looked a lot like Tuesday’s, up until between 4.5-5 miles, when it appears to have gone up over 160, maxing at 180 at 5 miles then hovering between 170-175 until 5.5 miles, when it dropped, suddenly and precipitously, to the low 140s. (I believe I was going downhill at this point.) It climbed back to the low 160s for the last half mile, but during that point, I was climbing as well, up the steeper long hill in the park. So while that it sense for my heart rate to go up while I went uphill, the values didn't make sense and the prior sudden leap to >170 and the sharp drop back to what I’d consider “normal” does not.
Nothing made me mad on Wednesday, so I didn't have anything to help float me through a few of those miles, and as I went on, I felt more and more glad that I was only doing 6 miles. As I worked up the last hill at the end of that 6 miles I felt quite done enough, thank you. Ok, so I did feel like I was working a little more than on Tuesday, but did I feel like I was working 180 bpm? I just don't think so. I’m thinking back to a month or so ago when I was doing hard intervals at 7:00 or better. My HR never hit even 170, let alone 180, during those intervals. These relatively-easy running periods with allegedly high heart rate were bothering me. I don’t feel like my heart is working that hard. When I was doing hard workouts where I’d expect my heart rate to be high, it was accompanied by everything you’d expect to feel from working your heart rate up that high while running: increased and heavier respiration, fighting against tiring legs, etc. I did not feel those things in that 170-180 period. I just felt like I was in the last mile or so of a run where I’d been going around under 8:15/mi. No elevated breathing. No rapidly tiring legs. And it just doesn’t feel like my heart is racing that fast. Can it beat that fast and just not feel like it??
Thursday I ran a T workout that felt more tough than usual. I'd like to blame it on longer T segments, but I wasn't even halfway through the first 15 minutes when I knew I wasn't going to make another 15 and a 10 as scheduled. I worried about my heart rate, but it was mostly my legs that were simply unresponsive, and I was crashing and burning just to make it through 10 minutes as the second interval. I even struggled through 1.1 miles as a cooldown. I worried about what my heart rate was during all this (I couldn't really keep track while I was running hard).
Looked fine. Normal range for T efforts, nothing bizarre during the easy segments. Ok ...
So it didn't happen every run. Maybe it was just some technical glitch that happened sometimes. I washed the strap and cleaned the snap contacts and when I went out for an extra easy-peasy trail run on Friday, everything heart-rate seemed to make sense. While I felt awful leg-wise for most of it (so only ran a little more than 4 miles), my heart rate tracked as it usually does on the trails with no outrageous excursions. Ok, that was encouraging.
Though I felt (feel?) reasonably confident it's not me, rather the equipment, I still couldn't help worrying that my heart might be doing wild things without me knowing it. While trying to figure out why the HR data was going so crazy, I wondered if maybe I'm on the verge of overtraining, which might lead my heart rate to start doing some funky things? I have never run so many 50+ mile weeks before so I'm in uncharted territory here. I reviewed what I've been running and decided I am probably running my non-quality days too fast (especially when something makes me mad). Even though the miles at 8:00-8:15 pace feel mostly fine, it's probably not easy enough to really allow me to recover, either from the quality workouts or from all the other days. It would explain why I have struggled to feel good for recent T workouts and have very heavy legs by the end of the week. Whether or not the apparent heart rate issue was real or not, I could probably stand to do easy runs easier and perhaps that would 1) bring any actual heart rate issue back under control by not overtraining and 2) help keep my legs fresher for when they have to run harder. So ...
Today I went out for an easy run and I made the effort to run easy. It's just not easy to run easy, and this is not something I just discovered today. I'm running along, easy, and my legs know they can run faster without feeling a whole lot more effort. So they just naturally want to run a pace that feels comfortable, and running easy does not necessarily feel comfortable. I often feel like I'm applying the brakes the whole time, because my system just wants to do more. I kept an eye on my heart rate today, to keep it from going much over 140. I didn't care what that pace turned out to be; over 140 is where it starts to feel "honest" -- not easy, not hard, but too hard for easy. Except for going up hills, I managed -- but it took vigilance. I did not notice any excursion into way-too-high territory, so I hope that by cleaning the strap I have put an end to this weird behavior.
On the flat, 130-135 bpm was 8:30-8:35 pace. That is plenty fast enough for regular, non-quality mileage. I'm going to make an effort to aim for that on non-quality days, and see if that helps keep my legs from crumbling after the week's miles start to pile up -- because except for next week, the weekly total isn't going to go down, and I don't want to have to back off -- everything I read says volume matters when you want to reach your marathon potential. But if you're not doing it right, you're not going to get there. I need to try to do it right. I'm still learning here, learning on the job.
Next weekend is the Caesar Rodney half. I don't want to pretend like it's just another Sunday run and train through, because I want to make a real effort at racing, so I'm going to back off on the mileage a little this week and not run hard until the race. My schedule had me doing a 12-13 mile run at marathon pace tomorrow, a 15-mile long run next week, and a very tough mix of T and long miles the following week; rather than do three pretty hard and long efforts three weekends in a row, I'm going to switch this week and next week -- just do 15-16 miles tomorrow and do the half as the either the MP run or the following week's T run. I'll see how I feel the week following the race.
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