A little bit of snow and a little bit of stress at work and BOOM, 10 days of no running!!!!! Well that should put a serious dent in this training plan of mine. Who would have thought that we would get nailed with a massive snow storm the first week in March?!? I guess I just wasn’t mentally prepared…. or it could be the fact that I have a 2 year old and a 4 year old at home who wanted to play!!! I wouldn’t trade any of my time with my kids for anything in the world. With having multiple full time jobs, I don’t get that much time to play with them so when I do, everything else falls by the wayside. I certainly don’t get paid to train and though it makes me feel good, THEY make me feel better. And once the weather got better? A massive project with work came up and I pretty much became a 24 hour a day employee for about a week. So instead of adding more stress to my life by forcing myself to run, I just took off. I’m sure you’ll understand.

So the last run was on March 2nd, right? Well March 12th rolls around (ugh, 10 days) and it’s time to get off my butt and run. So, just a little run, to ease back in, right? Have you met…. ME? Of course not! 1 hour 24 min run for 8.13 miles. Was it tough? Strangely no. These MAF runs are not that taxing and there is very little recovery time. MAF, or Maximum Aerobic Function, is the point at which your body is ideally using body fat as fuel and you are strictly aerobic. Dr Phil Maffetone pioneered the idea of taking 180 minus your age and that is your MAF number. There are some variables that you can figure in but most people will be at the set number. You are allowed to run up to 10 beats LOWER, but never higher. For me, my number is 143 (that makes me 37 for all you math whizzes).

The run was beautiful, effortless (still slow) and I enjoy the wonderful day with no snow and Bee Doo DOOOOO. Damn. Forgot about that. It takes a bit to get my heart rate (HR) back down to where I want it and the final number shows an AVERAGE HR of 145. NOT the ideal number since I’m never supposed to go above 143. The splits show that maybe I went out a little too hard:

Mile 1   9:36  Avg HR 151
Mile 2   9:50  Avg HR 145
Mile 3   10:11  Avg HR 143
Mile 4   10:45  Avg HR 144
Mile 5   10:34  Avg HR 141
Mile 6   10:50  Avg HR 145
Mile 7   10:55  Avg HR  143
Mile 8   10:47  Avg HR 144

Man….. I guess I need to get out more often…

FRIDAY   MARCH 14th

So I decide to go out on a little bit easier of a run on Friday. Partly because I’m disappointed that I went over my MAF range, and partly because I need to get some stinkin’ miles!!

I wind up with an “hour” run with 55min 22 sec while covering 5.32 miles. The best part is an average HR of 141, so I’m back in to my MAF range. Average pace of 10min 25 seconds, but I’ll take it…… for now.

Mile 1   10:17    HR 140
Mile 2   10:27    HR 141
Mile 3   10:25    HR 141
Mile 4   10:24    HR 141
Mile 5   10:28    HR 142

Nice run, very little Bee Doo Dooooooo. I’m happy and I get word from a friend that he wants to do a 90 minute run on Saturday morning, so I’m glad I cut this one short.

SATURDAY March 15th

So about a month ago I explained to my friend, Donnie, to stop worrying about his distance so much. Don was really stressing about his mileage and how he needed to do this and that and what if he had a bad day. I explained to him that when you run by TIME, instead of distance, you have a set variable. Who knows how long it will take me to run 5 miles on a given day. I could be sick. There could be traffic. I could have an AWESOME day. I could have a crap day. All that means is that when I say I am doing 5 miles, Laura has no idea when I’ll be back and, if I’m gone for a long time, it means that she gets worried. Running by TIME, though, is set. I’m going to run for an hour. Boom. Done. If I’m not back shortly after that, there may be a problem. May not…. if I cramp or something on the way back in, but normally I’m right on. It gives everyone piece of mind and it allows me to grow my runs each week.

So Don has been building since that run a month ago and says that he wants to run for 90 minutes. Awesome. We meet up (just the two of us as our other buddy, Dan, is riding today) and away we go. We talk the whole time. I feel awesome. Don feels awesome. The weather is awesome! EVERYTHING is awesome!!! (In case you can’t tell, I took Ben to see the Lego Movie and the song “Everything is awesome!!” is an important part of the movie… apparently).

The run finishes with very little backtalk from my Garmin 910XT watch, and its silly HR alarm. The breakdown goes like this for our 92 minute, 9.03 mile run:

Mile 1   10:15   HR 137
Mile 2   10:07   HR 137
Mile 3   10:03   HR 139
Mile 4   10:25   HR 137
Mile 5   10:19   HR 138
Mile 6   10:16   HR 139
Mile 7   10:18   HR 141
Mile 8   10:17   HR 141
Mile 9   10:23   HR 142

Love it!! Keeping all of my splits right in that same area is showing me that this training is helping. Over 9 miles I’m only seeing a 5 beat per minute cardiac drift at this pace. Now I’m hoping, and EXPECTING, the average splits to drop too. Though I’m not one for speed work when training for distance, I may throw some 30 second pick-ups in the next few runs to see if I can tax my aerobic system a little more and check out the benefit.

I’ll post some more this coming week and I’ll update that graph too. I want to see how these numbers are playing out!! Talk to you soon! No more long breaks…. promise.