My beating heart

After last Sunday's physically and mentally tough long run, I felt I had rebounded by Tuesday, feeling like myself and running comfortably at a pace I would call "honest" -- not easy, not hard. A kid made a comment to his mother as I passed that irritated me, and for a while I ran faster than I needed to. By the time my temper had cooled off, it had been a couple miles and now my mental treadmill was stuck at that pace. Wednesday, I ran similar pace -- that "honest" one, but it did not feel quite as free as Tuesday. I also had another HR monitor episode that really got me concerned. Tuesday's HR data had looked pretty normal, but Wednesday's ended up baffling me again.

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.

Week #12 -- feeling rough

Summary for week ending Sunday, March 20, 2016:

Number of workouts: 6
Total miles run: 56.45
Average miles per run: 9.41

Miles in March: 155.71
Miles in 2016: 527.58

Started the week with a 10-miler that bored me; refreshed myself with an easy trail run; then a T workout with a bubbly, squishy stomach and tired legs. On Friday I debated resting my legs or taking it easy on the trails again; I opted for the latter, and mostly enjoyed it, telling myself that it was going to be the last nice day of the week and I should take advantage of it. Saturday's hour was very slow, much slower than I thought, but I didn't really even try to work hard -- kind of like how I let my legs go on the trails, except this time not on the trails. I guess 9:00/mi is me not even trying to work. It was one of those have-to-get-it-done, just-get-it-done-whatever efforts in discouragingly overcast, low 40s; I almost overdressed because I guess I have quickly forgotten what one wears when it's 43 out, but even a light wind across the reservoir feels uncomfortable at that temperature so my layers weren't too much after all.

Sunday's scheduled workout was no walk in the park; I suppose there isn't much point to walk-in-the-park Sunday workouts if you want to try to run a PR or get as close to it as possible. T workouts are supposed to be tough. 2 mi E + 4(5 min T) + 60 min E + 15 min T + 2 mi E. I had actually looked forward to it, because the forecast Nor'easter bringing snow/rain for the day fell through and it was going to be dry, if cold -- I had expected to be running it on the treadmill, and instead I was given a reprieve and could run it outside. It was low 40s again and I wanted to do the run at Paper Mill Park, where I am never far from the car for fluids and fuel for the long effort. The sun was even coming out a little bit as I approached and saw, to my dismay, the park was overrun with kids playing soccer. I didn't know how long they were going to be there, so I wasn't even going to try to attempt to run fast on the path with all those little creatures sure to get in the way. I should have driven up to a high school and run on a track, but the idea of doing 60 min around and around was only slightly less zzz-ing than the idea of doing it on the treadmill; instead I turned around and went to the reservoir, where the flat 1.1-mile loop would seem to be a fine substitute location for this T workout.

One problem with the reservoir is that the parking lot is at its base, a 0.35 mile spur off the loop that is one, long hill. So, if I need a drink or gel, I have to figure in 0.7 miles into the workout, easy one way, not so easy the other. I decided I would run the 2 mi E and then just go right into the 4x5 min T, and get a drink and gel on my way out to do the middle 60 min E on other paths away from the reservoir. It wasn't hot out, I would probably be OK without having a sip in the middle of the T intervals.

I think I was wrong. My right side flared up and it was agonizing during the first two and a half T intervals; this happens typically when I have not had enough to drink, even though I did not feel thirsty. It was cold and I didn't relish the idea of that 0.7 mile spur just to get a sip, so I toughed it out, having to forcibly concentrate on maintaining form and breathing through the ache. Partway though the third interval, it seemed to dull somewhat -- still there, just not as on fire. It was enough of a relief to get through the fourth, and then head down to the car for fluids.

I was in a bad mood. The sideache was a complication I did not like to deal with, but mainly I was sour about the other problem with the reservoir: it is up and there is nothing around it that blocks the wind, which was blowing constantly at ~15 mph (according to the weather report). So for at least half of the loop, I was running right into a hand of chilly wind that has every malicious intention of making my T effort worse than it needed to be. I like doing T intervals where it's flat so that I can maintain a pace/effort correlation that makes sense. When the wind interferes, that pace/effort correlation is impossible to resolve. I decided that if I could get the intervals done in an average pace of less than 7:30/mi I'd call it satisfactory, but I'd have to look at the HR data later to see how it compared to other T workouts to get an idea if the effort was appropriate.

I wasn't feeling all that hot, let's face it. Sideache-plagued, defiant-wind T intervals, lowering sky and a temperature that was just on the edge of being too cold for shorts; and I was only about a third of the way done. I trotted down the spur to the car. In the parking lot, a pair of tiny dogs came racing toward my feet, yapping wildly and indignantly that I dared tread on their asphalt; their owner jokingly called out to me, "Just kick them!" (Only if they bite me.) The other owner asked me if it was very windy up there. I did not mean for my answer to sound smart-alecky, but I'm afraid it did. I wanted to say it was if you were going in one direction directly into it and indicate which direction that was, but it came out "Half of it is!" Oh well. At least she laughed.

I had some water and Gatorade and put on a pair of pants and a second long-sleeved shirt for the easy hour, which I did away from the reservoir on paved rail trails. My side did not bother me and I ran slowly, again not even bothering to try to run faster than 8:50 or so pace. It was during this portion of the run I noticed that the Garmin was apparently having difficulty with my heart rate. Normally it is quite sensible and pretty consistent between paces, but today I couldn't believe what it was telling me. That 8:50-9:00 pace I was running did not feel quite as slow as it sounded like it should, but my legs were getting tired after a long week and some hard running, and when that happens sometimes what seems like it should be easy isn't as easy as all that. But the discrepancy between pace and perceived effort was nowhere near what it should have been had my HR actually been what the Garmin said it was -- over 160 bpm and often over 170. When I do T intervals, my HR seldom goes over 160, so I was astonished to see it claim that. No way did I feel I was working as hard as a 160+ bpm heart rate should feel no matter what the pace. I stopped a couple times to feel it for myself and it didn't feel physically out of control like that, so I was puzzled. When I started back up, it would drop to a more expected value of 140-145, hang out there for a while, and then next thing I knew it was back up to 160-170 (!).

I don't know what was causing it to fluctuate so wildly high this time, but it seemed to start during the T intervals earlier, where it spiked over 170 during the 3rd and then soared up and hung out well over 180 (!!) during the 4th. Ok, I was working hard in those intervals, but come on. Even if I could maybe buy 180 during a too-fast T interval, I do not believe 170 during easy 9:00/mi running. Something was causing a misread there, and even though I figured I could ignore what it was saying, it still bothered me and staying in the corner of my mind; what if it was that fast and for some reason I just couldn't reconcile it with how it felt? Was it going to be dangerous for me to do the 15 min T after the easy hour?

I did the 15 min T, but at a pace much slower than I would like T to be, but, that wind and those tired legs meant the effort was 7:30/mi and that was just going to be good enough. 2 mi E after that and I was done. I guess to put into perspective how bad I felt for much of this workout, that tough last 15 min T and 2 mi E felt the best of it all, and that's not saying much (gives me evidence that those gels really do work, though -- I took one after the 60 min and before the final T effort). I got the whole workout in, I got the whole week's worth of workouts in, and I am very glad to call it a job done well enough and take Monday off to let my legs recover, to hope the sideache cools off and recharge myself for another 50+ week. Here's hoping for something warmer than 40 and can we please keep the wind to a minimum for once?

The Caesar Rodney half-marathon is in two weeks. I really can't guess yet how it might go. If I can feel good during this midweek's T workout and the extended marathon pace run on Sunday, I will be better equipped to make a judgment call.

Data crunching

I bought my treadmill a year ago, in early February. Up until that point, whenever I needed to get a workout done and was unable to do it outside, I used the Precor machine in our gym at work. I did a lot of quality stuff on it -- many threshold workouts and at least one 19-mile marathon-pace session (2 mi easy + 15 mi MP + 2 mi easy). I ran a 1:34:46 half-marathon off training that involved those workouts on that machine, so I feel they were doing a lot of good. Having done so many miles on it (I can almost guarantee no one else at work ran as much on that thing as I did) I had a very good sense of pace and effort on it; 7:30 on the treadmill felt quite a lot like 7:30 on the track, if not a little harder. Whatever the treadmill said I was running more or less felt like the same effort outside, and when I was doing ~7:10/mi T workouts, I felt comfortable and in control at that pace setting on the Precor.

I was very pleased to acquire my own machine for convenience reasons, but I quickly discovered during my first T workout at home that 7:08 on my Landice felt nothing like 7:08 on the Precor at work. I felt like I was flying, and I had to really, really work to maintain the pace. By this time, I had a heart rate monitor with my Garmin and made sure to use it while running on the treadmill as electronic proof that I had actually done the workout as much as for the HR information itself. I did not have the HR monitor for very many workouts on the Precor (approximately 10) as I have had for the Landice (40+), so there isn't a large bucket of data for the work treadmill. Comparing the average pace/average HR data from both treadmills doesn't show a dramatic difference between pace settings. It may be that the Precor data isn't a large enough sample size to be significant against the larger group of data from the Landice; there is quite a bit of scatter, too. Whatever the reason, this comparison did not show unequivocally that I was working harder on the Landice. I'll admit this disappointed me somewhat. I'd wanted to see those Precor data points way offset, but the results say what they say. Regardless of what the data points told, I knew what I was feeling. The Landice felt fast. There had to be a way to show that.

I set up an experiment.¹ I measured the length of the belt and then timed its revolutions at different pace settings. My first experiment averaged 3 trials timing 5 revolutions at a range of pace settings, from 1.5 mph up to 8.6 mph mostly in steps of about 1 mph to cover what I would ever be likely to run on it. I later also did a trial averaging 3 trials of timing 10 revolutions with a similar range in mph but adding a few more steps in the higher range (8-8.7, where I would expect to do my threshold running); it was easier to time 10 revolutions than 5 at faster speeds. From the time per revolution data, I was able to calculate actual mph and convert to actual pace, which I then compared to the theoretical pace based on the machine's setting.

At all settings, there was a significant delta -- the belt was moving faster than what the console claimed. Aha! So I was not mistaken; what felt faster really was faster. I plotted the data; I was expecting some linear dependence where I could calculate some constant I could use to estimate how fast I really ran (e.g., if, based on treadmill settings, I ended up with an 8:15 average mile for my workout, what was my real average pace?), and was confounded when the plot did not show any such dependence. See below (plot from the 5 revolution data set).

The plots for both the 5 and 10 revolution experiments have the same features, so I expect what I see is real. At low mph, there is a very large difference between the setting and calculated pace (more than a minute per mile); the difference jumps up between 1.5 and 2.5 mph, then, as mph increases, the delta decreases -- to a point, where it stabilizes between 5 and 7 mph; a slight increase at 8 mph before suddenly stepping down again at mph greater than 8, where it appears to stabilize again.

Well, this all looked weird. How should I treat this odd relationship? I never, ever run below 5 mph on the treadmill as part of the recorded workout, so in coming up with a correction factor I could ignore that region, which includes the curving part. The great majority of the miles I've put in on the treadmill are below 8 mph (only T workouts go faster, and they are not generally representative of the bulk of the running I do inside), so I could set aside those strangely-offset data points too. I'm left with data points that form a basically straight line with a slight upward slope due to the slight increase in difference at 8 mph.² (See below; plot from the 10 revolution data set, similar obtained for 5 revolutions.)

Using the slope of that line, I calculated adjusted pace for each mph setting; then, I plotted expected pace and adjusted pace for the range of mph settings I typically use to obtain a correction factor (the equation of that line):

Even though the calculations confirmed what I felt to be true, that the treadmill is faster than it says it is, I still thought that somewhere in the heart rate data would be the smoking gun to prove the calculations represented something real. Over the year-plus that I've had the Garmin with the HR monitor, I've racked up about twice the amount of HR data from running on the roads as I have from the treadmill. I've had fun playing with that data too -- correlating HR to altitude, temperature, etc. There is considerable scatter due not only to those factors, but others such also to terrain differences³ -- for example, some times I was in better shape than others or not recovered; some of those workouts are hillier than others, which can skew HR depending on whether I try to run even effort or even pace. Even with all the scatter, there is still a general slope correlating HR with pace. I wanted to compare road HR data (where, assuming reasonably accurate GPS, the reported average pace can be assumed to be actually what I ran) with the treadmill HR data. To cut down a little bit on the scatter, I limited the road data set to runs done in Delaware. The trend is still obvious regardless of the remaining scatter. By plugging in the as-obtained average treadmill place data into the equation from the correction factor plot, I obtained adjusted pace data, which I then plotted with the road data. The treadmill points fall right into the thick of the road points.

The calculated pace of the treadmill looks like it's comparable to the road pace, based on my heart rate. At last: I'm satisfied, and when I'm aiming at a target pace running inside, I can adjust the treadmill mph in good faith.

See anything I missed taking into consideration in my data crunching? Please let me know!

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¹Note: experiments were performed with no one running on the treadmill. It can be expected that the weight of a person running would create some drag on the belt, slowing it relative to no weight on it at all. I cannot judge how significant that would be for me at 110-115 pounds. All data analysis treats this as negligible. Perhaps in the future, in the interest of scientific accuracy, I'll redo the experiment and have someone else do the timing while I'm running those speeds.

²Perhaps someone with experience/knowledge of motors could explain to me why it would work so inconsistently in this fashion.

³I deliberately treat trail workouts separately (due to GPS accuracy issues, mostly).