Tonight’s Run

I tend not to write one-off post about running. It’s enough for me to wait until the end of the month and then give a summary of how that month went. But tonight was special. And not special in a terribly good way.

Below I’m going to post some of the images from the running app on my phone. I use Wahoo to track my running. I like the clean interface and the heart rate options that it gives me. I used to use MapMyRun, but it doesn’t let you track your heart rate without a premium subscription. Free versus a paid subscription: free wins almost every time.

So here they are:

So what, you might ask. What do these images have to do with anything?

Well what is interesting is that my average pace was a lot less than what I have been building it up (down?) to over the last two months. 11:46 is nearly 30 seconds slower than where I had been. Granted it’s only the first week of the month, but still I found this interesting. Why? Hang on, I’ll get there.

In addition to my pace being up, my heart rate was way up. 145 average heart rate, and 156 for the max heart rate.

So, pace down, heart rate up. Why?

If you look at the third image, you will see you that I have only managed to run four times in four weeks. The last run before tonight was only 2 1/2 miles. Per the summary, I ran 8 miles one Sunday, then nothing for a week, then another 8 mile Sunday, then nothing for two weeks, then 2 1/2. (The 2 1/2 was an interrupted run. I would probably have pushed to go farther, but had to call it off. But to be fair, I just wasn’t feeling it.)

I think the bottom line is that I’m losing conditioning. So much time not running (along with eating like crap these days) has meant that the work I’ve been doing on the Maffetone Method is in danger of a big backwards slide. So I think it’s time to knuckle under. But maybe I’m wrong? What say you, out there in Internet-landia?