"Speed"

Image nicked from here

I have a week of annual leave from my job at the Sexual Health Clinic. I have some course work to do and some reading for tomorrow but I have all day to do it so I thought I'd get the day started with a run. I had a notion that I wanted to go up to the Meadows and do some kind of speed session, however lame, so I figured out how to get the Garmin to time me to run "hard" for 3 minutes and recover for 2. Times 5. The science behind this was that I felt I could face 5 X 3 minutes efforts. Because of my sore ribs (which are getting a lot better), I can't wear my heart rate monitor, and I think this is probably a good thing. So I was gauging "hard" by feel.

I wasn't sure what the Garmin would show me during an interval - and as it turned out all it showed me was the time counting down, so I had no clue as to my pace either.

It was a beautiful sunny, icy day. A good day for it. I haven't pushed hard in some time and it felt pretty awful. I had forgotten how to do it. Breathe and don't think. It felt better in the last 2 or 3 efforts but then as I discovered later, I'd slowed down for them and that was probably why.

When I'd finished I had a look at the numbers - they were pretty bad - I'm not telling you how bad - but then I now remember all the times I thought I was running badly and in retrospect I now think I was running pretty well. So if my running future is not just to be a repetitive sequence of me thinking I'm doing badly only to find out later that things can get worse, I think I have to take a radically different attitude. So all I'm saying about today is that I ran pretty well!

Tiny little Nicola Duncan was flying round the Meadows in her pink shorts while I was out there. She didn't see me, but with our speed differential, she probably mistook me for a tree.

I had a headache but I didn't take anything ferret.

Yesterday WAS  a long day at work. 8am to 9pm, and during that time I can only remember drinking tea. There's probably no mystery then as to why today I woke up with a bit of a headache. Not a thumping headache  but just a bit of tension over my left eye. Its a shame. I so look forwards to my days off but sometimes work takes a bit of recovering from. Stoically, I went out for my run without taking any painkillers - it never got worse but it never got any better either.

I went for another home-made speed session up on the Meadows. Apparently its the easter holidays. There were an awful lot children. I didn't mind the children per se, but its tricky running past them and their mothers. You daren't run between mother and child because if the children get startled they run for their mothers even if that means running right into your path and the place of greatest danger. Like foolish sheep. Haha. I enjoyed my run but I was a bit grumpy.

Some young people had a ferret on a lead. I would have liked to hang around to see how ferrets and dogs interact in a park setting, but I was, after all, out for a speed session, so had to move it along. I did the same session as last time; ran easy up one side of the Meadows and then booted it down the other side. It splits up into very nearly .75 of a mile each way.

I did 5 times round the Meadows and then went home via the back of Arthur's Seat to extend the distance a bit. 14.07 miles in all. I didn't drink while I was out so was MORE dehydrated when I got home and my head ached still so I popped some paracetamol.

Okay, that's picture number 1 taken care of but why picture no. 2? Well I just wanted to mention that I watched the Coen Bros. film "Burn after Reading" the other night and I really liked it. I think the critics had a bit of a go at it for being light but it was exactly that quality I liked about it. It is the first time I've ever liked Brad Pitt in a film. Usually he makes me bristle and when he plays serious roles I get the impression that he's walking around thinking how good he looks - that he's shallow and narcissistic. Well in this film he plays a rather shallow, narcissistic gym-bunny and I was actually sad when...but I better not tell you that, in case you haven't seen it and you want to. It also doesn't suffer from being too long which is a great quality in a film.

My headache didn't go away so I had some ibuprofen as well and that seems to be doing the trick. And I'm trying to discipline myself not to spend too long staring into the flickering light.

rage and complacency

Today dawned (dawned at 9.30am) cold and grey and damp. Clouds hung around Arthur's Seat like they do in Japanese prints. I guess its something to do with humidity although I don't know if its still humidity when its cold.

I had planned some kind of speed session and for want of a better idea I headed up to the Meadows for 5 X 1 mile at "pace" with half mile recoveries in between. Before I went I tried to think about what pace might mean at the moment. Maybe if I could squeeze my heart rate up to round about 93% of max. That's about where it is for a 5K.

Trying to run hard is so different from trying to run long. Running long is all about keeping a steady head on you and not getting in a flap about anything. Trying to run hard is about getting in a flap. Well I assume so. I'm crap at running hard - or I am at the moment - and I immediately got into a place of conflict. As my heart rate went up then all my sirens started to go off. "I cannae hold her Captain, she's breaking up", shouted Scotty from the engine room. I saw my heart rate settle back down as without thinking I slowed up. "Get a move on Bozo", chibed another voice, "this is a speed session isn't it?". I was helped by a girl with a blond pony-tail who had the temerity to run past me. "I'll bloody show you!" I thought, and held on just behind her until she stopped. Presumably she was following her own interval session. I was delighted to fly past trying to look better than I felt. My breath was rasping and I felt sick. "Hang steady to the end of the road" ordered the Captain. "Aye, aye Sir" I rasped and did just that. At the end of the 1st mile my heart rate was 173 - 94% of max.

I knew that I'd gone off too hard and was unlikely to equal my first mile but I had managed to break the thick crust of my complacency and start to hurt myself. Hurrah!

I had my half mile recovery to get my heart rate back down and have a bit of a think about things. There's nothing like running harder than you want to to make you appreciate running easy. I wondered if bad temper and irritability is really necessary for running hard. Maybe not - and yet, to paraphrase a Zen master, you cannot achieve anything without risking your equilibrium...

So the 2nd and 3rd miles went a bit easier than the 1st. Harmless students morphed into stumbling idiots as they walked in clumps and failed to make room for me as I bore down on them with my little pink fists pumping. "Out the way you fuckers!" I didn't shout. (at least not out loud) "Someone making an effort here!".

The 4th mile, as per tradition, I was all at sea, starting to feel my real tiredness but not near enough to shore to dig deep and make a proper effort. Lap 5 I pulled out as many stops as I could and matched lap 2 (the 1st lap was the quickest.) Then it was a delight to jog home. So much so I went the longer way round the back of Arthur's Seat to make the total run up to a bit over 14 miles. Back home I do feel better for having pushed into the red zone.

I've included a screen shot of my heart-rate, elevation and pace from the Garmin. The pace (blue) never tells you anything. The heart rate does show you where you're making an effort. I see that the efforts I made have a very similar shape to Arthur's Seat. The green line shows elevation and I think I've found Bert Logan's hill in the meadows. (Bert claims to have a hill session in the meadows. The rest of us are bamboozled. ) That must be what slowed me down in lap 4.