Tues AM aerobic

Run Type: Aerobic
Distance: 18.4 km
Average pace 4:33/km
Week to date: 18.4 km
Temperature: 25; moderately humid

The thing about marathon training is its insatiability. As soon as you have moved up a level in training and fitness, there is always another level you can go to. And if you take your eye off the ball for a minute, you can find yourself in a holding pattern, doing the same training week in and week out and no longer getting the stimulus needed to increase aerobic endurance or raise the lactate threshold.

And this is the dilemma I now face. How to squeeze more into the week. I can increase intensity, and I tried that last Tuesday with the tempo run. Or I can run further, but finding the time is now difficult. Anyway, today I tried to nudge up the distance. After having just done the half-marathon pace run, I didn't feel quite like going at tempo pace again, especially since tempo pace appears to be a painful 3:55 min/km or thereabouts. So I decided to try and run a bit longer than the standard 16.2 km. In short, I did one extra lap, for a total of five, at Komazawa Park.

I ran most of this at a heart rate of 140 to 145, with the last couple of laps creeping up near and touching 150. In the first few laps this gave me uphills of 4:36 (still warming up), 4:16, and 4:21 and downhills of 4:11, 4:13, and 4:15. By this time my heart rate was well and truly at or above 145, and then the next two laps gave downhills of 4:19 and 4:19 and uphills of 4:25 and 4:26 (so there is still cardiac drift occurring, but it is not particularly pronounced). These last two I ran with Horst, the German man whose 14 y.o. son comes to the track workouts.

The point about this data is that I am now a bit confused about my heart rate training zones. Previously my upper zone was in the low 150s and that gave me a pace of mid to high 4:20s. My lower zone of about 140 gave me a pace of 4:40s. So they were both some way above ultimate target race pace. But now if I run 150s, especially while fresh, I'm running at something like 4:06 pace, and as evidenced today, even a heart rate of 140 to 145 is converging on target marathon pace. And this is only going to rapidly exacerbate as the temperature continues to drop.

So do I just keep training at these zones and accept the pace that comes? Or do I adjust them down a little to get the pace back to above marathon pace? Or do I actually get aggressive and try to push up the heart rate zones (145 lower, 155 upper) and get an even stronger stimulus and potentially a considerably faster target marathon pace? For example, at this rate, with another good seven weeks of hard training available, I could reasonably be looking at running a 4:08/km to 4:10/km marathon at a heart rate of 155!

On a sour note, Australia lost the Ashes last night. Much teeth gnashing and introspection ahead. We were outplayed over the series, but there wasn't much in it and probably shouldn't have been with some better management, captaincy, and luck.