Day 3 - Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Today was a great, but tough, run.  I always push myself harder than I should pace-wise because my stride-memory, the rate at which your leg is comfortable turning over to the next stride, remains about what it was in college, which was then a comfortable 8:00 min/mile Easy pace.  But now that pace feels like an all out sprint.  So whenever a person gets back into something which they've already done, it's extremely tempting to do so at the same intensity as before.  This almost always leads to some sort of injury, which likely put them out in the first place.  So tomorrow, even if I'll be poking along at a 12:00 min/mile pace while scrambling up a hill, I will keep my intensity at a certain level.  How do I do this?  Easy.

I was introduced to Polar heart rate monitors my junior year of high school while a student at Fort Richmond Collegiate in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  These are great for educators, especially PE teachers, because it records the heart rate, and HR averages, of an individual over a certain time.  Therefore you know that even though that nerdy marching band player is poking along at the back of the pack, her heart rate is beating faster than anyone else on the track.  Therefore, that nerdy wimp should get an A+ in PE for the first time in her life.  (Good job Mom!)

Often times when training, we're training too hard.  Inversely, when we need to be training hard, about twice a week, we're not training hard enough.  Through the bio-feedback of a heart rate monitor we come to understand the correlation between our muscles, our lung capacity, and our hearts; what I call aerobic intelligence.  A friend in college, grizzly Nate, had a pace like you could set your watch to, a human metronome.  He knew his pace and consequently rarely, if ever, got injured.


These days I've graduate from a polar heart rate monitor to a Garmin 405 GPS/HR monitor.  Costing roughly about the price of an annual membership to 24 Hr Fitness, I'm now in the middle of my second year with this device and it has proven to be phenomenal in helping me monitor not only my heart rate, but also my pace,  distance, and calories burned.  It keeps track of me wherever I go, if I have it on.  Nowadays they have programs for your iPhone which do the same thing GPS-wise, but until you can strap an iPhone on your wrist without it looking like the old Garmin watches from the 90's, I'll stick with this one.  On top of all this, you can program different runs into your Garmin device that simulate fartleks (look it up), or any other type of workout, speedplay, that you would want.

Because of this, I like to get lost.  That is, I'm not tied down to a certain route, though I do like to fall into comfortable patterns where I know the route will end in a nice round number of miles.  But with this I can track my weekly mileage to a greater degree without always guessing on how long it took and my perceived pace, which is almost always faster than what it actually is.  For example I ran for 30 minutes and it felt like I was running around a 10:00 min/mile pace, but in reality I didn't get that much sleep last night and what felt like a 10:00 min pace was really an 11:00 minute pace.  So I didn't actually run 3 miles.  Again, having a GPS/Heart Rate Monitor, keeps you honest, humble, and in perspective.  It gives you knowledge, and of course, knowledge is power and will help you train more efficiently and accurately.

So here's to getting lost!  Here's to running around and discovering new trails.  Here's to going down dead ends only to discover that you found a new and interesting running route/ trail tucked away between two houses.  Here's to doubling back, going the wrong way, but not worrying about it.  Here's to the great adventure of suburban exploration, discovering neighbors that you never knew you had.
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Today's Run