Getting slower to get better ??

Apologies for lack of posting we have been away on holiday to OZ for a couple of weeks and then I've been finishing off jobs around the house while waiting for my next contract to start. This has been great as I have been able to get plenty of running in.

However, as you may be seen from my earlier posts I have a recurrent injury both a physical one and a prolonged issue with my CBA* muscle! So after what I would like to think of as divine intervention, by way of my many recently listened to podcasts, the concept of heart rate training has come up on the radar again. 

I have tried and failed many times in the past to run to heart rate (HR) as I felt ridiculous going out so slowly and felt that people would judge me for my pace.  Not I that I have ever bothered  Jo Pavey or Paula Ratcliffe with my times, however, the fear was real. 

So last week I started out trying to run in zone 2 which was a big struggle and the only zone I could semi maintain was zone 3…which is not really following the rules of HR training However by being in zone 3 it was still 12+ min milling so I felt justified. But the problem was my heart rate would spike into zone 4 and I would have to stop and walk or just stop altogether for my HR to come back down into zone 2/3. Once this had happened I would start off and within minutes it would spike again.  Equally the HR alert I set up on my watch was getting annoying and I was convinced that it wasn't helping to keep my HR down. 

In an effort to keep the HR rate,  I switched to pace rather than HR; with the aim to keep my pace above 10:00 mins miles, so my watch alert would only tell me if I was going too fast.  Not truly HR training but when I reviewed at the data and compared the run to the same run a couple of days before my pace averaged out to 11min miles and the percentage I was in zone 3 was better than the last run, as you can see. 

Having said all of that, today I went out again a slightly shorter route, granted a few more hills but it was a struggle to keep both my HR and pace where they needed to be. It is a bit of trial and error which I have time for as my target for this year is purely about consistency and other than the holiday which did throw a dent into the consistency plan I have been regularly running 4-5 times a week. 

What is next??  to keep to the to pace training for all my runs excluding any quality running and see how I get on….however, I am hiding all of my runs on Strava so only I know……..

*CBA = Can't Be Arse