Training by HR.

I've been generally been doing my long runs at around 8:30 min/mile which is in a comfortable zone for me. I wanted to bump up the pace a bit. I used to train based on HR which allowed me to reach whatever pace the HR dictated. Last year, I bought into the pace thing where as long as I was running in a certain pace range for an expected marathon time, I was okay. I didn't see the improvement gains I thought I should so I'm back to trying to run by HR. I've been using 160 as the upper range for my long run HR, but I've been using that for the past 4 years. I should probably re-evaulate that. Will have to try and determine my max HR at some point.

So today was 17 miles on the schedule. I decided to run the same route that I ran last week as it would allow me to make some comparisons. Last week, I did 17.2 miles in 2:26:00 for an average pace of 8:29. My legs were still a little sore from the race yesterday, but I had to try. I used my foot pod measuring thing which I haven't used in a while. the calibration is all screwed up in it. The split times are all wacky. Anyhow, I finished the 17.2 miles in 2:18:45, 7 minutes or so faster than last week which averaged out to 8:04 pace. It was getting really tough towards the end though. The HR was below 160 for most of the run. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the HR as it gets warmer since I think the HR is artificially lower when it's relatively cool outside, like it is these days.

Total for the week was 53.9 miles. This upcoming week was supposed to be a 65 mile week which included a 15 mile run on Thursday. I think I'll cut back on the 15 miler. I've been thinking of trying a marathon pace run next Sunday and don't want to burn myself out.