I ran 12 km on Thursday night with some people from work, my ekiden team members in fact. Nothing too fancy, 5k around the Imperial Palace in 25 minutes and then 5k in 21:30, sort of upper aerobic, borderline tempo pace. Just a couple of weeks now until the big day!
So I had yesterday off. No point overdoing things I reckon. But then today I wanted to do another speed workout. I thought of doing a fartlek, but opted for an easy run to Komazawa park (3.8 km) followed by an interval workout dictated by my trusty(?) rs200sd. I set it for two zones: 1 minute 15 seconds at 5:00/km to 6:00/km pace (recovery) followed by two minutes at 3:20/km to 3:40/km pace. Well, it turned out 3:20 was waaay ambitious and I was sometimes struggling to stay above 3:40. Next time I could go for 3:35 to 3:42 and it would probably be about right. So, I decided to do ten of these. Since they were based on time, the only way to really measure the evenness is by the distance covered, with a longer distance equating to a faster rep. Since the precision is only to the nearest 10 m this is probably less precise than timed splits over set distances. Have to remember that the course has a long gradual up and a long gradual down, so they are not all exactly comparable (not that I know which are which now). Anyway, here we have the splits as distance (km) of 2-min rep/distance of recovery, (average HR of rep/ave HR of recovery), maxHR(%) in 2-min rep:
1 0.55/0.22 (162/158) 92%
2 0.54/0.24 (164/158) 93%
3 0.54/0.22 (176/164) 95%
4 0.54/0.22 (169/160) 96%
5 0.54/0.23 (166/159) 94%
6 0.52/0.21 (167/161) 96%
7 0.53/0.19 (167/158) 95%
8 0.55/0.20 (169/159) 97%
9 0.52/0.18 (166/157) 95%
10 0.55/----- (170/----) 97%
The most striking thing is how short the distance of recovery dropped after the fifth rep. Basically I was knackered and I didn't care that the watch was beeping its head off at me to jog a bit faster. Get stuffed, I said, I set you too fast for the recoveries! I must admit, I have not breathed that hard while running for a long time, so there was a real sense of it doing good, in the old anaerobic training kind of way. Having that many reps was a different psychological game as well. I was able to keep pushing through, but around rep 4 and 5 I was talking myself into cutting back the number. After six I actually physically fet more comfortable with it even though I was getting more wrecked towards the end of each rep (as shown by the HRmax). Overall I am pretty happy to have gotten through it and happy to have kept a reasonably even pace, through the hard reps at any rate. It certainly makes for a different set of numbers to get your head around as compared with, say five or six 800s or 1000s.
Nice easy social long run tomorrow.
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About Me
- Stephen Lacey
- Born in 1963 under a camphor laurel tree beside Bilambil Creek, I now live in Tokyo with my Japanese wife and three sons. I started running in 2002 and my addictive personality soon clasped this foolish pastime to its bosom. I am also an enthusiastic amateur brewer and have won a few competitive home brewing awards in my time. Diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2015, today I can no longer run, and my blog posts are more likely to concern the waxing and waning of my condition.
4 comments:
No wonder you and 2P ended up in the same blogging team, all those HR figures. But hey, it works!
So with your company Ekiden, are other employees as talented or enthusiastic about their running as you are?
err...well...there is one guy who is a triathlete -- Nakagawa. My enemy... There is a prize for the fastest overall time for the 5k lap of the Imperial Palace. I won it two years ago (18:17), he got me last year (me 18:30, him 18:10 or so). I have broken 18:00 on the track once since then (just before the marathon) and was sort of hoping to break it around the Palace. A hard task though, and the interrupted training hasn't helped. But um, usually, no, most people are not quite as stoopidly obsessed as me. But there is a good turn up. I'll try and give a better description after the race. Funny, I still remember the first year this was on when I joined the company...I hadn't started running. They asked me to participate and I was like, uh uh...that sounds really, really harrrd!! LOL!!
I'm buggered just reading those splits!
Those splits should see you in front of your 'enemy', Stephen! I hope you have a reat run & look forward to reading all about it.
That maple at my front door (thanks for the comment!) is a beauty...called "Ever Red", a weeping variety. They'd be pretty common where you are!
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