Marathon Training: Week Four

Watch Me Go…

That’s right, dad puns. Sure, I’m not a dad yet, but it’s on the list of things to do, so I might as well start getting in the groove.

It might not immediately seem clear why that’s a terrible pun, so here: I bought a new watch. A running watch, specifically. I’ve never been a huge fan of wearing watches for style purposes and we all have phones these days, which tell the time, so if I was to get another watch it was only ever going to be for run tracking.

I learnt from my negative experience of getting a smart watch with fitness tracking built in (in fairness to Samsung, the Galaxy Active doesn’t actually have any notable smart watch features either; their app store is full of nothing but watch face designs and basic puzzle games. So at least it’s a consistently poor product across all fronts) and decided to go straight for a dedicated running watch.

I watched a bunch of reviews and settled on the latest Garmin Forerunner model. It wasn’t cheap, and none of these things are perfect, especially not when it comes to communicating data, but so far it’s been a big improvement over my old watch.

One of the features I’ve been using a lot (which wasn’t available on the Active) is the real-time heart rate monitor. This allows me to better tailor my easy runs and recovery runs to my needs; instead of running off of pace, I can switch the interface to heart rate and just make sure I’m staying in the right zone.

*The Galaxy Active does have a heart rate monitor, it’s just incapable of updating the display while running. Hell, even when I stop mid-run, stand still, and hit the button to measure heart rate, it still almost always fails to provide an updated reading. At the end of a run, after nothing but messages on the watch telling me to stand still and that it can’t get readings throughout, it then comes up with a detailed graph of measurements, from start to finish, for the heart rate it spent the entire run insisting it couldn’t measure.

Tempo Run (Monday) — 5km at 13km/h:

Stop the presses, something monumental has occurred: I ran a tempo run without discomfort and with fuel in the tank. For weeks one to three this has been my hardest run by a country mile and each iteration has been a real struggle.

I ran the exact same 5km distance at the same pace during week one and it left me seriously worried about my ability to complete my training plan going forward. Well, this week went a long, long way to assuaging those concerns; I felt good the whole way through.

Speed Work (Wednesday) — 3 x 1600m at 14.2km/h:

I guess I have to put this down as the hardest speed work session to date, although, in truth, it was another routine run.

Speed work is yet to cause me a problem, and I’m toying with the idea of eventually bumping each session’s speed up by just a few tenths to see how things feel. However, for the next few weeks at least, I’m going to be sticking strictly to the plan, as my main concern is not pushing myself too hard while I’m still unfamiliar with the stress and strain of regular training.

The longer these intervals get, the closer these workouts become to threshold or tempo days, and so I guess it makes sense that I felt slightly less comfortable running 1600m and 1200m than I did running 400m and 800m. The problem is that I really want to focus on upping my long distance running pace more than anything, so I’d really rather it was the other way around.

Long Slow Run (Thursday) — 14.5km at 7.3km/h:

Finally managed to nail this one. Pretty much everyone says it, but I’m going to repeat it anyway: it’s not easy running slow. Keeping the pace down and stifling your natural urge to speed up requires concentration, or at least it does if you’re new to the idea of running easy.

This week I had my new Forerunner, which meant I could scroll on down to the heart rate display on my run tracking and ignore pace entirely, trying to maintain a heart rate in that zone 2 level that the running internet is always raving about.

I don’t know if I’m just not in as good shape as I’d like, or if I have a higher max heart rate than the default one-size-fits-all setting (I strongly imagine it’s the former), but even going at a pace that seems glacially slow my heart rate still tends to creep up into zone 3 a lot. It’s annoying, and leaves me wondering if maybe I’m still doing something wrong.

From now on I’ll be going purely off heart rate for my easy runs, and trying to stick mainly just below the border between the blue of zone 2 and the green of zone 3. I may even try to test my max heart rate when the holiday is over and I can get back on a treadmill (I hate running at pace on the road).

Recovery Run (Friday) — 5km at 7km/h:

Conventional wisdom tells me I’m not doing enough slow work, and to build some more into my routine I’m now trying to throw in shorter, easy, recovery runs wherever reasonably possible.

This was, I think, my first go at doing one of these and it felt pretty good; just a short, slow little jog to get the muscles moving and remove a some of that stiffness from the days before.

One extra benefit of these, if I can fit them in at home, rather than the office, is that I should be able to cajole my wife along too. After all, these short easy runs should be an appropriate pace and distance for her to build up some basic fitness and she really doesn’t get enough exercise as it is. Hopefully, she might even end up enjoying the routine and we can run together more often.

Long Run (Saturday) — 16.5km at 11.2km/h:

So, tempo run went well, speed work was uneventful, easy run felt great, hell, I even threw in a proper, slow, easy recovery run, the week’s been going well and there’s only the long run yet, a run format I’ve been taking in my stride from week one. Oh, and this week’s long run is the shortest since week one.

As you can probably already tell from the set-up, I struggled like hell with this one, and I have no idea why.

I didn’t feel great from the start, and by about kilometre 11, I was really suffering; kilometre 14 was a 6:13 split (my target is around 5:20). I dug in deep and forced out the final two full kilometres at a faster pace, before stumbling through the final 500m. Suffice it to say, this was a huge come-down from my optimism earlier in the week.

Recovery Run (Sunday) — 4.5km at 7km/h:

I was staying late at the office expecting a last minute proofing task (working Sunday as a make-up day for the coming Spring Festival holiday), so I didn’t think I was going to have time for a run. Eventually I got tired of waiting and popped upstairs to the treadmills to see how long I could squeeze in before the task eventually arrived.

In the end, we got notification (but not until around half seven) that the task was delayed and could be completed next day. So I managed to finish my 40 (ish) minutes of recovery running before heading home to get some late dinner.