The Perpetual Running Thread: 2011 Edition!

[Mat8iou]

Huh, that's interesting. I'm still on the bright side of 40, so while I'm past my athletic peak I've got a long way to go being well above average for fitness in general. I am planning to get back to interval training now that the heat of summer has abated a little (I usually do some combination of 100m or 200m sprints with 400-500m cool downs, and that's entering silly territory when it's 40+ outside). But I'm in a similar range for resting/max heart rate (I think the lowest my resting heart rate has hit that I've seen was 39, but normally it's in the mid 40s/low 50s). Max is low 190s. I didn't realise that this was considered specialist territory if I ever needed to see someone about it. I do notice when I'm out on longer runs that if I have to stop at lights or for traffic my heart very quickly drops down. I certainly wouldn't consider myself an elite athlete, but I also have to remind myself that most people don't run 30-50km a week combined with other activities.

We do have an ex-olympian as part of our running group (although for a completely different sport), and I think that's been a pretty positive influence on everyone tbh. She's super positive and encouraging, but mostly it's been her inexhaustible willingness to get us all training that has helped. And not in a taskmaster-style of brutal training, just a get-out-there-and-do-something attitude. She keeps telling us that she wasn't genetically special, it was simply that that was her job.

Interesting. From what I've heard it isn't necessarily about being top level at the sports - more about the amount of time spent training and for how many years - which probably tends to push it more towards runners and cyclists as a trend.
Usain Bolt had a RHR of 33. Average for adults is 60-100.
30-60 is apparently not uncommon for endurance athletes like ultrarunners.

If you see the chart here, runners, cyclists and triathletes seem to come in the lowest.

https://blog.ultrahuman.com/blog/what-is-the-normal-resting-heart-rate-for-pro-athletes/

I wonder how much heart rate zone training (not really done for many sports other than running generally) can affect this data. I know that not everyone does it, but as a specific type of training it could also affect things like resting rates in the long term.

Max HR according to the basis calculators is meant to go down by one beat per minute each year for adults. Going back through old data on Garmin though, mine is about the same as it was 9 years ago.

 

[Cognac]

Interesting. From what I've heard it isn't necessarily about being top level at the sports - more about the amount of time spent training and for how many years - which probably tends to push it more towards runners and cyclists as a trend.

Yeah, I think that was kind of her point as well. It's just that elite athletes have a lot more time to spend training over the course of their career.

 

[Mat8iou]

My new HRM strap finally arrived.

I'd actually done one more run this week while waiting for it. Weather was averaging 30 degrees according to the Tempe meter on my shoe. Forecast was lower, but the clouds had gone and it was bright blue sky, so being in the sun probably made it feel warmer. Was mostly doing laps of a track that is a bit hilly in parts. HR was mostly under control, but spiked to 188 at one point after I left the track and was heading home. I don't feel this is that plausible TBH - I was still going at relatively easy pace and although it was uphill at that point, the hill isn't steep.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17679638058

Anyway, new HRM arrived and today is cooler, so went down to the flatter track near me. Apart from running 1.8km to get there, I stayed on the track for the remainder - and avoided a sprint finish that could skew things. With the new HRM on, the HR did seem to stay lower, although I can't really tell if this is from the temp, or the device (or both). The overall average was 7bpm lower than my last time on that track (where the 200m sprint at the end shouldn't have swayed the average that much in reality.

I saw no weird spikes though The max was 163bpm, not something in the mid 80s. Now I need to test things on a more varied route and see what happens.

Consider that on my fist run post TBI (on 20th Feb, so not that long ago - but in warmer weather), the HR average was 18bpm higher. MTHis was at pretty much exactly the same pace, but over 5k (on more recent runs, any rises tend to be after the first 2k or so once my body is fully warmed up.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17702854898

At the end, after I had cooled down, I decided to do a lap as fast as possible. Weather was getting warmer by that stage as the sun had appeared. I went just over one lap to get it up to 500m (which is annoying - partly because I thought it should be 500m already and partly because the track has a corner at the end, which is hard to maintain pace on.

Anyway - it gave me an average pace of just under 3:54 min/km, which I'm happy with, considering that I'm about 9 weeks into post brain surgery rehab and I haven't been doing much speed training for a couple of years. HR data (which was sort of the main part of this exercise) gave an average of 166bpm, from a start at 110. It peaked at 186 (still lower than I was seeing before on some easy runs), which seems about right. Moreover it presented a pretty smooth graph of increase, starting fast and then with the rate of change slowing until it was nearly flat.

It also felt afterwards more like I had pretty much maxed out. All the previous high HR moments didn't feel right - I was still able to talk and not that out of breath etc.

You can get an idea that there must be some sort of GPS weirdness going on from the graph on Strava.
My cadence (pink) is nearly continuous, but my pace (blue) rises and drops a fair bit. The chances that I was keeping the same cadence, but randomly varying my step size this much seem fairly unlikely. HR (red) left in for general info.
I notice that the pace at the start is nearly the same as the end - which kind of fits my perception that it always records a bit slow near that corner.

I've just realised that you can actually see this pretty clearly even on longer runs on that track (image below is from the previous 10k). There may be a slight slow down at the corner in the path, but it actually produced a double spike for every lap (I highlighted one between the green lines). I think the deeper spike might be the corner, but there is no explanation for the middle one other than the GPS reading different at that point.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17702916191

I'm not quite sure what all of this proves at this point - but I feel like the tuns are definitely starting to feel easier than a few weeks ago. I'm not sure how much of this is down to recovery though and how much down to being back in training (although I didn't really have that long to detrain).

Garmin still shows my VO2 Max as 2 below what it was before I went into hospital - so that is sort of a measure for me of where I am at (short of any other measures being available).

 

[Mat8iou]

Had a meeting with my physio yesterday (first since being discharged) and went through stats on recent runs and compared them to similar distances last year. She is encouraging me to do longer runs again now - by ramping up the distance of one of my weekly runs until I'm back to doing the sort of distances I was doing pre-accident.

Headed down mid morning to the usual oval I've been doing laps in recently. Did about 12 laps there, then looped further out through the adjacent park. Realised that it isn't a great route as the road doesn't have a pavement on the side where I wanted to run, so went back to a few more laps.

Discovered this route has its own segment - named the tea bag. I can kind of see it... sort of...

Anyway, after 9k I headed back home by a more roundabout route (I used to sometimes to it after tempo runs). Once the major road crossings are out of the day, it has a reasonable amount of uphill and is then downhill towards the very end. I was wearing that new HRM strap and noted that while my HR rose on the hills, I didn't get any crazy spikes like I was on earlier runs. Max was 181, which is reasonable. It is higher than what I would have expected before, but it is warm, I'm just getting back into training and I'm recovering from a major injury, all of which can affect things.

Anyway - ended up at 12k - my longest run in 2026.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17748268605

When the weather cools a bit or my HR is lower, I need to start varying the speed a bit more on runs. For now though, I'm fairly happy considering where I was on my first run post accident that was less than a month ago and 6k at a similar pace to today (but today was longer and hillier and had road crossings which always mess a bit with average pace) but my average HR was 8bpm lower (if I'd stayed on the flat it would probably be a fair bit lower still).

Also, I realised that I could get more features from the new HRM to show on my watch and on Garmin Connect by downloading extra fields. So I now have details for running power. At the moment as it is the first run I've done using it, it is not that useful, but longer term for training I can see it being helpful for making comparisons. It is an interesting measure (previously available only through third party foot pods) in that it takes into account a whole range of factors (see link below) including wind.

https://www.garmin.com/en-ZA/garmin-technology/running-science/running-dynamics/running-power/

At the moment I'm getting 4.12 w/kg. I imagine the easiest way to boost this is by losing weight without losing speed.

There's a detailed review of Garmin's Running Power when it first came out. Looking at the date of that article, I suspect that both the newer tech and their calculations may have been refined a fair bit since then.

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/12/garmin-running-power-good.html

I guess I'll need to look back on it in a while and see what trends it shows to determine how useful it is. Even if it is just giving something similar to HR, but without the temperature variation that that tends to be affected by, it could be a useful measure.

 

[Mat8iou]

Should explain that the reason I’m so obsessed with HR when running at the moment is that it is common for it to be high or erratic post TBI - your brain is trying to relearn control of bits of your body that it normally manages in the background.
That is at least in part probably why it was high on earlier runs - and also why they put HR monitors on everyone's arms at the gym in the rehab centre and see the output from them on the screen all the time - in a way normal gyms wouldn't care about. From what I've read, it can hit quite critical levels with some people. For me though it was mostly just elevated above normal - or would peak at way below what I felt my maximum exertion level was. It kind of felt almost like my whole system needed recalibrating. There were weird spikes and it was sometimes briefly way high than I'd recorded before. I can put some of it down to errors in the watch based sensor as I know these have their problems. The thing was, the errors were different to what I would have had on an average run normally, so something was still amiss.

I'm probably unusual compared to many patients in that I have detailed data of what it was doing before as well as afterwards, so know better what I'm aiming for it to end up as. I know what my VO2 Max was before the accident, so that is one easy target to aim to get back to now.

The physio's take is that it is probably hard to pin down things to individual factors: I'm recovering, so my elevated active HR is gradually going down (resting HR didn't change much from what it was before). I'm also getting back into training, so my HR at the same speed is likely to be lower. Finally, the weather has been cooler on some recent runs, which definitely also makes a difference.

Previously, particularly before the beep test, the physios asked me to skip my morning coffee as they thought the caffeine not long before was also elevating my rate in the results. It was not something I saw much normally as when working I usually ran first thing in the mornings, before eating breakfast or having coffee, the only thing I'd have occasionally was a glass of water beforehand. Perhaps I need to get back into early morning runs and see how they go. The problem with that plan though is that I still need way more sleep than normal, so would need to get to be really early if I was going to get up early enough to run.'

All this interest in my heart rate comes after generally barely looking at it for most runs other than intervals and threshold runs.

 

[Mat8iou]

Did a couple more runs two days apart (that's just how the week worked out).

First one was just heading back from dropping my son and then doing the second half as laps on the track. It was the first run I've done since the accident with lots of minor road crossings along the way - which in some ways is good, because it doesn't seem that long ago that I was having to go through an exercise to demonstrate to OTs that I could still recall how to cross a road safely and not get lost on a short walk.

I'm still pausing my Garmin for the big road crossings, as I know they make me pause a while and I get too tempted to get back to my average speed target afterwards, leading potentially to random HR spikes.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17772581504

Then today was my 11th run since the accident (9th since being discharged).

I was aiming for a 25min 5k (between km 3 & 8), so 5 min/km pace for first time in a while. Probably should have thought and picked a flat park for this.

It seemed to go well initially. By 3km in (6km total), HR was hitting 185 on uphill section, so slowed down for next km, then sped up again for final km (7km-8km total). HR was really high again towards end (maxed out at 192 with the monitor strap, not wrist based), as I pushed it to finish fast (which was also on the uphill stretch of the path).

Cool down at the end wasn't that easy as that section of the route home was in large part uphill.

Could probably have managed the target pace of on a flat track and if weather was cooler.

Fastest run since TBI, but didn't pan out as neatly as I wanted it to. More training required. Max HR on threshold runs before Christmas at a much faster pace (4:30 min/km) was about 182, I'm now maxing out at least 10 higher than that at a slower pace (albeit on a hillier route).

Weirdly, at the end of it, the central portion ended up only 2 seconds off my 5k target time, despite throwing in the recovery lap. If I'd known this, I'd have pushed myself to claw back that 2 seconds on the downhill / flat on the last lap. It's still 2.5 minutes slower than I was managing (on a flat track) at the end of last year though.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17784842912

I probably shouldn't be so hard on myself - I'm still in the middle of the early recovery stage from the injury. It's weird though seeing the HR rising way faster and higher on some runs than I'm used to. TBH, I mostly didn't look at the rate during runs before - only afterwards on the graph - because it was whatever it was. Now, I'm deliberately slowing sometimes, because I'm not even sure where the max is.

 

[continuum]

You're definitely ambitious!

 

[Mat8iou]

You're definitely ambitious!

Or foolish.
Not sure which.

OTOH, if the physios weren't encouraging me, I doubt I'd have ramped back into my running programme so quickly.

 

[continuum]

OTOH, if the physios weren't encouraging me, I doubt I'd have ramped back into my running programme so quickly.

Given your previous posts in this thread, somehow I doubt that!

 

[Mat8iou]

Given your previous posts in this thread, somehow I doubt that!

Possibly. If the physios had told me not to run I'd have listened. I was surprised though at first to have staff in the hospital encouraging me to push myself more, rather than trying to hold me back.

 

[Mat8iou]

Other things got in the way of my run yesterday, so today was my first run of the week (12 since injury) and marked my second distance increase, adding another 2km to last week's longest run. It's a process of weekly run duration increasing that I've been through a far few times before, after lapses in running for whatever reason. The most recent times were during lockdown, and then when I moved to Australia and had pretty much paused long runs for quite a while before and immediately after because I just hadn't had the time for them.

Today, was 14km and I decided it was worth getting away from running around a track, so did something more resembling normal runs, following a fair bit of one of my old early morning run routes at the start. I was going far enough that I actually plotted out a course in Garmin, although a hidden loop in it meant that the distance didn't quite match up (Garmin Connect decided I clicked a point on the wrong side of the street, so went forward to a crossing point and then back to it, before going forward again to the next point).

It was good to go on a run with more varied scenery and no real looping. I'd been down all the roads before and kept most of it fairly simple. There were a few hills, both at the start (smaller ones) and the end (bigger ones). My HR was doing OK until I got to the hilly bits, where it rose more than I would normally expect for an easy pace run on a mid sized suburban hill. That said, it was probably better than it would have been a few weeks ago and I knew that I had no option to lose time on the hills, as I'd already lost time on some big road crossings and had an average pace target in mind.

Because of the loop in the plotted route, I had to cross a few more roads near the end to meet the distance target, rather than just finishing at the base of the last big downhill, which I thought was going to happen.

I'm still in the phase where I think I'm going for easy pace, but Garmin is looking at my HR and calling it a threshold run. Hopefully this goes with more training / more distance time wise from the injury, but feels a bit weird for me and kind of makes it harder to do actual fast runs.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17834764153

Also, as a general FYI, my account of my beginning to the year is pretty much ending up at book length. It takes place before any of the actual outdoor post injury runs, but there'll definitely be some mention of running in there (along with a lot of really weird stuff).

https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threads/am-i-accidentally-writing-a-book.1512219/

 

[Mat8iou]

10k run today (13th since injury). Followed the route from the fast run from last week, but kept to 6 min/km space throughout.

Built up a bit of a buffer zone at the start as there are a couple of really big road crossings and I wanted to see how I did without stopping and starting the timer at them.

Felt like harder work than an easy run should. I think my legs were tired from the hills on the long run still and this run was on the loop that is slightly hilly.

I definitely didn't feel that I could have attempted last week's fast run pace today on that course. HR was higher than I would have liked too, although no really high spikes (peak was 176 on hills near the end), so in theory better than runs a few weeks ago. as this time there was more reason for the spike and the spike was less.

https://www.strava.com/activities/17859159871

I feel that I need to put these runs and temp / climb / pace / average HR / Max HR into excel to get a better overview of how they relate to a few typical runs from November / December of last year. Garmin / Strava aren't great for comparing or seeing the general trend.