Tag: Garmin

2019 week forty five

Book Read
None

Kilometres Ran
week forty five – 70.1

2019 to date: 2,321 KM

I didn’t read any books this week but I read some other stuff. First was a Vice article called I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb and Airbnb really doesn’t seem to care. Whether or not you use Airbnb it’s an interesting article, and if you do use it there are some useful tips to watch out for when looking for a place to sleep. Most of the rest of the stuff I read was also about sleep after my physiotherapist suggested I try paying some attention to the Orthostatic HR Test. I’m not very good at it because when my wake alarm goes off at 5:10 a.m. checking my heart rate is the last thing on my mind. Anyway, the test goes like this:

HR1 = HR on waking (or resting completely for 15 minutes)
HR2 = Stand-up, pause for 15 sec then take HR again
HR2 – HR1 = X
If X is >15-20 beats per minute difference, you’re likely not fully recovered from the training of the day prior and should take it easy.

It’s not an exact science especially since I only just barely trust the optical heart rate monitor on the back of my Garmin Forerunner 235. But at 5:11 Thursday morning, after getting smashed on the track at the Mile2Marathon workout the night before (the Kipchoge Special: (2,000 / 400 / 1,000 / 200) x3) and then not getting to sleep until well after 11 p.m. it pretty firmly suggested I take an easy day.

Along with the heart rate math, my physiotherapist sent a couple article on sleep. The first, a pretty easy read titled Sleep, Recovery and Human Performance, which is pretty high level. The biggest take away being that I need to find a way to convince my employer that I need to take a 15-30 minute nap between 2 and 4 p.m. And I am seriously considering giving up my lunch break for some quiet time in the afternoons. The other is the opposite of high level – IOC consensus statement on relative energy
deficiency in sport (RED-S): 2018 update from the British Journal of Sports Medicine. I was pretty tired (no surprise) when I started reading it on my phone so suffice it to say I’m going to need to revisit it.

Tiiii-yerd.

Then because the world seems to want to hammer this sleep idea home, and the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon is real, Alex Hutchinson’s Sweat Science column in Outside this week was 5 Laws of Sleep for Athletes, which among other things reaffirmed that I need to nap more. In the article there’s a link to a sleep questionnaire from the Centre for Sleep and Human Performance. I completed it and scored 7, “which indicates that you have mild clinical sleep difficulty.”

So with four weeks to go until the California International Marathon I have one really hard week and then one pretty hard week and then a sorta hard week-ish and then a taper and I am laser focused on the task at hand but I will also be trying really hard to spend at least 56 hours per week for the next four weeks horizontal.

2019 week forty one

Book Read
39. The Nature Fix – Florence Williams

Kilometres Ran
week forty one – 68.4

2019 to date: 2,108 KM

I finally got around to reading this Alex Hutchinson recommended book and I thought it was mostly great but that’s the great thing about books put together like this, when they start to focus on kids you can just skip that part and it doesn’t take anything away from the plot. The really basic takeaway from this book is quite similar to the (also Hutchinson recommended) one I heaped acclamation upon earlier Running is my Therapy by Scott Douglas. If you were to distill both down they would say pretty much the same thing, and that is one way to decrease stress and increase happiness is to get outside, preferably with trees, even better near water. Douglas says to run while you do, and Williams for the most part agrees but is fine with some sort of activity.

So I chose for my activity reading, and the afternoon before the Victoria Half Marathon I took a couple hours and sat in a weather-beaten adirondack at Kitty Islet on the edge of McNeill Bay looking south across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and read a book about getting back to nature and watched seals bob and birds dive and got the inch-wide strip of bare skin between my pant cuff and my low cut socks absolutely ravaged by mosquitoes. But was I chill and ready to break my first sub-90 minute half marathon the next morning? Fuca!

I set this up to be my last chance to complete my goal to run a half marathon in under 90 minutes. My last 21.1 KM race was the Seawheeze back in August, which I ran on less than 12 hours notice and still nearly went under 90, finishing 1:31:43 and feeling like maybe it might come back to haunt me as a missed opportunity. But I was ready for Victoria and everything came together. I was a bit worried at the start, after a morning of race nerves in the stomach that lingered for a bit longer than usual. The gun went for the mass start of both the half and full marathon runners. My plan was to run a hair over 4:15/KM pace, which would get me to 10 miles in 1:08 and then run the last five (mostly downhill) with whatever I left. I went out a bit hot, splitting the first couple kilometres in 4:09*** and 4:04. I tried to let off the gas a little bit but I felt great, so I found a rhythm that felt just a bit uncomfortable that I could maintain. My goal pace at 10 km was 42:39, and my game plan was 42:30. I crossed 10 km at 41:30 and was still feeling pretty great. Other plan was to fuel at 6 km, 11 km and 16.1 km. First fuel was a wee bit late, and yet I felt a bit of fade coming on just past 11 km. Normally if you feel the need to fuel that means you’re too late. My experience with the two that I can stomach is Endurance Tap kicks in in 4-5 minutes, and Maurten in about half that time. I train with ET and I like it a lot, but I race with Maurten. I did falter a bit over the next few kilometres, but only compared to my pace to that point. I saw a 4:17 on my watch and thought I’d maybe blown my cushion but was still confident that 1:29:59 was within reach. I passed 16 km and when I didn’t see the 10 mile marker I checked my time. I wanted to be 1:08 but my watch said 1:07:30.

I took my last Maurten just before 17 km and hit the traffic jam. The course meets the mid point of the 8 km race, whose gun goes 50 minutes after the half and full, and everyone runs the last 4 km together to a shared finish. There are a lot of people running the 8 km race, and the ones I’m encountering don’t seem to know to stay to the right. I don’t think I lost any time, but it did get pretty crowded. I was able to pick it up and dodge my way down Dallas Road and still give a hard finish over the last 1,100 metres and finish 1:28:04 chopping 3:29 off of my personal best, and 2019 goal 5/6 achieved. Eight weeks until the California International Marathon and I have all of the confidence.

2019 Goals recap:
run 2,019 km – Oct 5th ✓
sub 6:00 Mile – 5:52 ✓
sub 20:00 5K – 19:40 ✓
sub 40:00 10K – 39:22 ✓
sub 1:30:00 HM – 1:28:04 ✓
marathon BQ – *pending*

***4:09 according to the Garmin app. I remember checking my Garmin watch and it read 4:08. According to Strava (which gets its information from Garmin) I ran either 4:10 (Strava iPhone app) or 4:11 (Strava browser).