May 28th, 2009 – Half Marathon Training Easy Run

Another run of only 6 miles today.  I have made the deliberate choice now, no more half mile of warm up and cool down.  It’ll be a quarter mile, a single lap of each and just hope for the best really.  I think that’ll help some with my feeling of exhaustion.  If not, well, best I can do is hope that at some point it goes away. :)

Equipment issues continue to nag me.  At one point, the monitor said my heart rate dropped from the 160s to 89 beats per minute.  Impossible given my known recovery skills and the graph shows a flat line which means the sensor wasn’t making good contact.  I don’t know if I need to adjust the location, the tightness of the band, or if I’m just sweating too much for it to work right.  I know that if I even wanted to entertain swimming with the thing, it better work no matter how wet, but I am not exactly quite at the point of a triathlon either.  I still haven’t consciously made up my mind to even think about attacking one of those, and I’m not at all ever considering an Iron Man length.  The other equipment issue still annoying me is the foot pod.  I can’t seem to get it to calibrate correctly.  I’ve adjusted it multiple times and it still doesn’t see the same distance that the treadmill does.  I don’t know if incline is negatively affecting it, or if my gait is the problem, but something’s got to give here.  I need it to tell me what my real distance is.  I’m no longer switching between treadmills, so I hope that I can get it to work with the one that lets me run for as long as I can.

Housekeeping:  6.5 miles in 57:19.  With the decrease in warm up and cool down, an 8:49 per mile average is only 3 seconds below my target, though the 6 miles in the middle is still over the target pace.  699 calories burned.  At least that number seems to have stopped swinging so wildly.  It tells me my body has adjusted to that component.  If I can just get my mind wrapped around it, I’ll be fine.

Ache in both hips and left knee.  Strength training obviously a factor in muscle fatigue.  I’m trying to let it go, since I know that at some point my muscle recovery will improve.  I just don’t want to get injured now at a point when I really feel I’m about to break through.

Cheers!