The Solemnity of the Tuesday Morning Run

There is something about my Tuesday morning run that makes it important to me. It is always a decent distance, usually no less than 12 km, and generally involves a fair whack of it at a heart rate up around 80% of maximum. It makes me feel good to get the running week under way with a nice solid hit out like that (Monday is always a rest day). So if I miss it, well, I kind of miss it. It is a chunk out of the week. Last week I missed it because of the football, and as a result only ended up with 48 km for the week, which felt kind of low, whereas 60 or 62 km would have felt respectable. And the main thing missing was Tuesday.

Anyway, after a bit of recent lethargy and waning motivation, I got out of bed this morning and got into it and ran 14.1 km in 1:06:18 at an average heart rate of 140 (75%max). That was split between the first half being at around 70% and the second half at around 80%.

It occurred to me during the run to adopt this precise run as a sort of standard fitness metric. The routine will be to run to Komazawa Park and run one lap maintaining a heart rate below 75%. Hopefully, somewhere within that time I will get my morning constitutional out of the way (as I did this morning at the end of lap 1). Then on the second lap I will increase the pace to get the heart rate to 80%. Then, the third lap, starting around 39 minutes into the run, will be the metric with the heart rate kept at as close to 80% as possible, speeding up or slowing down as required as slope changes. I will plot the pace for the third lap and track it to see if it changes over the summer. I'll have to record temperature as well. It might make for some interesting data analysis. Here is the first graph (temperature today was 24 degrees and very humid):

Yes, yes, I know there is not much of a trend there just yet, but give it time ;-)