Sometimes I wonder how I fit my life into my life! I have become so good at time management I often think I over do it, simply because I can fit it in! I often refer to myself as the Queen of Over-Commitment and perhaps, one day, I will slow down. However, today was not the day!
After copping out on FD#1 yesterday, and knowing I probably would tomorrow… walking her was #1 priority. So the alarm went off as it always does at 6am and we were up and out the door. I opted for a longer walk as she seems to be missing out a bit lately so off down to the local football field and 45 minutes later she was happily lying at home on the deck in the morning sun! Then I had to wake CBoy as he was off to work at 8am. Dropping him off, I went to another local park that is home to Little Athletics and has a 400m grass track marked out. It was Fartlek morning!!
I was keen to give these a go as I’d not run proper intervals for years; and they were just as hard as I remember them! I fudged the program a little, which asked for 4 minutes easy and 3 minutes hard, and made it two laps easy and one lap hard. It is easier to count laps than look at minutes on a watch, especially when I don’t have my own official time keeper. It was the most gorgeous sunny winter’s morning, and I felt proud of myself to be out there and slogging it by 8am in the morning. So 18 laps of 400 later…and I felt ordinary really, proud, but ordinary. The aim with Fartlek’s, but I’m sure most of you know, is to run the easy laps at a lower HR and the hard laps close to maximum. The heart is a muscle just like all the others in your body. Long runs at low heart rates are great as you feel like you could run for ages…this develops the thickness of the heart wall muscle building endurance. Short sharp sprinting work increases the size of the heart, as in making it a bigger muscle, building quickness and the ability to sustain a work rate at an elevated HR for longer. So the fact that I’m training for endurance, doesn’t mean I don’t have to do sprint work. But in truth, if you’d watched me, nothing I do ever comes close to looking like sprint work…hahaha. And with Fartlek, your fast laps become slower, until they resemble your slow lap, and your HR doesn’t recover as well in between. So, after 18 400s…7.2km, I felt like I worked hard enough.
My avg HR was 155, with a maximum of 183!! My maximum (220-your age) is 177 so that would explain why I felt like my chest was going to explode in the last two “hard” 400s. I know this formula for determining your maximum HR is simple, and there are more complex and accurate ways of figuring it out, but I’ve always thought my real maximum HR must be higher than this, because I seem to have trouble keeping it lower...even when I was much fitter years ago.
I needed to leave the car where I’d parked it at CBoy’s work, so I decided to walk the 30 minutes home as a cool down and to get some vitamin D in the gorgeous winter sun. Five loads of washing, lifting 15 sqm of ceramic tiles and cleaning it up (which took longer than lifting them), a shower and lunch later, MGirl and I headed off for her netball game at 1pm. It was nice to just sit for an hour and watch her team, who unusually had a win. After that I took CBoy to a party and when I got home at after 4pm I was happy to get into my pyjamas and do nothing. MGirl was out for the night…and by 9pm I was out like a light!
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