March 24th, 2009 Base Builder 3

So, today was my first workout after I started this new blog.  The title shows the date of the exercise and the type of exercise I’m doing.  For those of you that haven’t actually asked up to this point, if anyone is actually reading, all my training is actually cardiac training, where I am pushing to train my cardio systems to burn fat more efficiently at higher heart rate intensities.  A base builder 3 is an interval exercise where I have 5 minutes of warm up, 60 minutes in a 3 minute repeating pattern of 2 minutes in heart rate zone 2 and 1 minute in heart rate zone 3.  Basically 20 repetitions of that exercise.  Then, I have 5 minutes of cool down.

I can exercise however I want to get my heart rate up into the target zone.  Colleen typically uses incline, while I use speed.  Speed allows me to push myself to faster times in road races, which only fuels the fire to accomplish more.  In the end, I completed 8.3 miles in the 70 minute interval for an average pace of 8:26 per mile.  Since my races to this point have been in the 7:20 per mile range, I’m obviously training well below race speeds on the average.  I do, however, attempt to run significantly faster for as many of the early intervals as possible and had some where I was averaging less than 6:30 per mile, but only in 1 minute slices.

For the housekeeping I promised, 8.3 miles in 70 minutes as I stated above, cooking up 849 calories in the process.  Since today was also a strength training day, I did another 30 minutes of strength training for an additional 297 calories.  This poses an interesting challenge for me in general as I try to balance nutrition into the equation.  About 7 weeks ago, I discovered that I was actually starving my body.  For more than a year, I’d been on roughly a 1750 calorie a day diet.  I was doing so intentionally as I moved into what I considered phase 3 of South Beach which is considered maintenance mode where no foods are off limits, just minimize the quantity.  Well, one of the trainers at the gym looked at my physique and suggested that I needed to have a calorie point test done.  This is a Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) test, which is used to determine how many calories your body burns when basically doing nothing all day.  His explanation was that my build seemed to suggest that I wasn’t eating right and this test would help establish what I should be doing.  It turned out that if I was in bed all day, I’d burn 2050 calories!  That means my 1750 wasn’t enough to sustain even doing NOTHING!  Ouch!  They do an odd estimate that says based on my normal lifestyle, I’d burn an additional 700 calories over the course of a day, which means my daily intake alone should be 2750.  On training days, at the time, I was burning around 750 calories for a workout.  That meant on training days I was supposed to be taking on 3500 calories!  OH MY GOD!  Turned out that my body was desperately hanging on to fat in the one place men hang onto it most, in my midsection.  It explained why I was thinner than I’d been since High School (I graduated at 155 pounds) yet still had a slight spare tire (OK, so perhaps it was just a bike tire, but it was still spare.)  Anyway, the point of all of this is that I had to slowly start taking on more food.  I couldn’t just go from 1750 to 3500 in one day.  That would cause my body to definitely store it as fat.  So, I had to add 200 calories each week until I got to my 2750 for non training days and then once I’d reached that point, start taking on 3500 on training days and 2750 on regular days.  Now, that is where my conundrum kicks in.  As you saw above, my housekeeping indicated I burned 1146.  Does that mean that I should now be upping my caloric intake on training days to 3850?  So far, that answer has been no, but I am worried that it should be yes.  Hard to judge really.  I think perhaps after this next race, I’ll look into it.

This interval training run is “easy” in my mind.  There is enough changing of speed and challenge that I don’t notice I’m running an hour solid.  I just have 20 repetitions to complete.  I watch my miles pile up and it always makes me laugh that less than a year ago, my warm up speed was once my top speed.  I also laugh that I am now able to run 6:36 mile pace, even if just for short bursts, when before that was too much for me to believe I could safely stay on the treadmill.  I think it took the IBM 5K last November for me to really come to grips with how much my fitness had improved and the 10K in February to come to grips with my endurance.  I think it was the success of my first 10K that convinced me that I was even ready to consider a half marathon this year.  Originally, my plan had been for 2010 (there’s a huge race in Virginia Beach around Saint Patrick’s Day that looks really good) and after running that 10K and feeling like I had more to give to the race after I finished I am now considering accelerating the plans.

I also added some additional weights to the lifting.  A few of the exercises had been getting easier and that is a sign I needed to up the weight.  We’ll see how sore I am over the next few days and go from there.

Got home and uploaded my workout data into the tracking application.  I use a Polar Heart Rate monitor with an infrared link to a PC application.  It keeps my mileage, pace and heart rate for each exercise which then I upload to the PC application to look at cool graphs and trends.  That’s part of what got me hooked, honestly.  The heart monitor has high geek factor to start, and having an application I can use to see the results only feeds the geek in me. LOL

I also synched my iPod.  I have an 8GB Nano and a playlist I call my work out Jam.  My MP3 library is roughly 40GB total, and this playlist intentionally rolls songs off to see exactly how much of the library I’ve actually listened to.  So, it becomes a part of the process to remove and add new music almost daily.  New only in the sense that it hasn’t ever been played as far as iTunes knows.  It means there’s a very eclectic mix of music and I never know what will pop up.  Some songs wind up being almost de-motivating, but it is just part of the process for me.

Well, that’s enough for my first run post.  We’ll see how this goes.

Cheers!