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Sunday, July 13, 2014

Plan fine, execution ehhhhh.

7.67 miles yesterday.  It was supposed to be seven but I miscalculated the route.  Here's why.  I absolutely detest running a route that is just a hair too short, and then having to run past my house or do another loop around the block to get the mileage completed.  So I tacked on what I thought was two miles to the start of my run, but it was a little closer to two and a half.  Of course, once one does that at the beginning of a run, there's no choice but to have to run home.

The run went well.  I saw another deer on the trail.  This one was young, and quite a bit smaller than the one I saw earlier in the week, and it stopped and stared at me as I approached before continuing down the side of the mountain.  I admired its fleet feet as it kicked up its heels.

My own heels were dragging a bit.  I'm working on increasing my cadence.  Cadence is one of those things where I'm convinced most of the running community has confused correlation with causation.  Elite runners take around 180 steps per minute; slower runners like me take fewer.  Therefore, we should all aim to take 180 steps per minute.

To be fair, I suppose it's really no different than the logic we hobbyjoggers fall into the rest of the time.  Elite runners wear Brand X's ubershoe; if we wear the ubershoes we will also go fast.  In any case

That said, the sports scientist guys suggested in their book that most runners would benefit from increasing their stride rate by 5-10%.  From experience I know I take about 162 steps per minute while running at an easy pace, so I planned to listen to a Podrunner mix during my long run with a BPM of 165 to gently work on increasing my stride rate.

While the run was fine, the stride work was awful, even as I kept my feet light.  I felt like I couldn't artificially keep the tempo, and my stride felt forced and too short.

When I got home, I realized, I had accidentally uploaded a mix of 160 BPM.

All the planning in the world can't fix airheadedness.  On the plus side, the run consisted of nicely even (for me) splits:

Split Time Distance Avg Pace
1 09:58.5 1 9:58
2 09:56.6 1 9:57
3 09:51.3 1 9:51
4 10:04.9 1 10:05
5 09:48.8 1 9:49
6 09:55.4 1 9:56
7 09:46.2 1 9:46
8 06:37.8 0.67 9:52





I arrived home to the kiddo demanding milk (daddy was sleeping in), and so I stupidly didn't stretch or cooldown properly.  As a result, by late afternoon my joints were not happy, and my evening I spent rolling out my quads with a marble rolling pin while watching Orange is the New Black.

Happy Sunday!



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