Aerobic Training Started - ed4 - you there? (Read 663 times)

You will see an improvement over time. If you haven't already, you may want to check out the Low HR Training group here on RA. You may want to start a little slower - you may be able to go a little longer that way. Also, downhills are great for being able to pick up the pace some while keeping the HR where you want it.

If you can slow yourself down even more (believe me, I know how hard this is!), if you can just run the first half of your 10 miler with your HR in the low/mid 140's, you should have an easier time. I am actually quite jealous of how fast you can go, when I first started, I had miles in the 15-16 min/mile range. I've been doing similar training. In the beginning, I was stuck at about 4-5 miles before I couldn't keep my heart rate under control. Some of my long runs in the beginning, I went over my targeted rate (146), and just let it happen (I was training for a 10 mile race that I had already committed to, so I had to get the longer runs in). I did that for about 2 months, and it was still better than the way I was originally training, which was every run at too hard of intensity. After about 2 months of playing around with it, I switched as of November to all low heart rate, for a base building phase of a few months. In November, I have had several runs of 10-13 miles without difficulty holding my HR down the whole time. My easy pace I used to think was 10-11 min/mile, but increasing my mileage on that left me tired/injured/sick. Doing the low HR training, my easy pace has dropped from 15 min/mile to 13 min/mile (on a good day) just with 2 months of playing around with this, and one month of committing 100% to it. Of course, I am really hoping that continues to improve! I have learned a lot of good info on the Low HR group mentioned above also.

Hey Eddy, my first workouts looked a lot like yours -- very similar paces and very similar drift over time. But there's hope! I can now go for about 10 miles with hardly any drift at all, at paces around 8:30. Here's my updated pace graph: The trend line shows my mile pace speeding up by about 18 seconds per month. I intend to see how low it can get before it levels out. Your body will adapt to the slower paces. As long as you're taking it easy anyway, this is a good time to be conscious of your form. Slow doesn't have to mean sloppy. But remember, your plan isn't to run slow, it's to run easy. And easy will get faster and faster. It just takes patience. The first three weeks are the hardest. After that you'll start seeing improvement and it's much easier to stay motivated.

I wrote a Python script that grabs my log data from the site, parses out the parts I care about, and hands the data off to Gnuplot for the actual plotting. I'm happy to share if anyone is interested, but it's not exactly plug-and-play. In particular, the script is hard-coded to retrieve my data, and it would take some extra work to make that configurable. The design of Runningahead doesn't make this easy. If you're willing to do it by hand, you could export your running log to Excel to copy out the columns of interest, and then use Gnuplot manually generate a similar graph. I got tired of doing it by hand.