I took Cliff’s advice and got out into the snow yesterday… to help my neighbours clear the road. Having spent three hours shovelling snow, pushing wheelbarrows of grit and spreading it around, I didn’t feel the need to get out there again today in my shorts and t-shirt.
Instead I climbed aboard the magic carpet and set about catching my brother’s drift (see comments on previous post https://www.fosterruns.com/2010/01/running-on-the-spot/).
My initial aim was to complete one hour running at 7mph but as I warmed up over the first 800 metres I changed my mind to try to run 7 miles in one hour… it may sound like semantics, but this meant that I had to run faster than 7mph to catch up on the time lost warming up.
I set the carpet to 7.5mph and got on with running as efficiently as possible. This involved focusing on my footfall, making it as steady and controlled as possible. At the same time I remembered what the Bok taught me and relaxed my upper body, arms and jaw and kept breathing steadily.
Actually it was a surprisingly comfortable speed. This was evidenced by my heart rate, which stayed under 160bpm for something like 5 miles. Inexorably it did climb higher, but for the most part it was still under 170bpm.
I think that I passed the 7-mile mark at 58 minutes, but by this point I had recalibrated my goal. Unsure of the exact distinction between a short and a long run on www.FosterRuns.com and unwilling to be accused of only putting in a short run… as well as being a namby-pamby for not running in the snow… I had decided to complete a third of a marathon, which is about 8.7 miles.
By the time I got there however, it seemed churlish not to continue to a nice round ten miles.
I was relieved that by the time I reached ten miles, I did at least feel the effects of the speed I was running… otherwise I may have been forced to revise my marathon target time down even further! Whilst it’s true that I did stagger a little to get across to the study where my camera was, it was nowhere near the level of staggering that I experienced after the early sessions on the machine in August or September. Ergo, despite the sporadic nature of my recent runs, I must be getting stronger!
My heart rate hovered between 170 and 175 for the last couple of miles, but I covered the allotted ten miles in 82 minutes… an average of 7.3mph.
We’re in the process of turning our orange bathroom white and one of the by-products of this is that the shower downstairs is now more powerful… which is one reason that I stood under it for a small age once I had replaced some of the 1276 calories I had burned up.
