Platypus' Beginners Guide to Running

hargi said:
Im 5'8 and 11 stone.
Normally do a track session on a Tuesday night ( anything from pyramid, 200's to 2000) Thursday is normally a hill session or like a street run with different efforst ( 1hr) Saturday is parkrun ( sometimes I run there and back 5k each way) Sunday is longish run day 10k to 10miles depending on how I am feeling.

My Tuesday and thursday sessions are normally consistant sometimes I miss a weekend run. Not really done many races this year. Though I will be doing crosscountry again so 9k in the muddy stuff
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Doesn't sound like you are doing much easy general aerobic running? That is the most important part of training and will see the most substantial gains in performance. Even a 5K is around 84% aerobic in nature, so you want to spend most of your training time int he aerobic zone.


20% or less of your time should be doing something fast/hard like track work or hills.


https://runnersconnect.net/running-training-articles/aerobic-training-run-faster-by-running-easy/
 
Itchytrigg said:
My Garmin allows me to program workouts, so I just set it up to give me 15 mins warmup (I could have defined a heart zone but didn't), then a repeat section with 30 secs followed by 1 min recovery.

30 secs I just pushed about as hard as I could, should have probably gone slower (hit 5:04/mi on my fastest) but was having fun, then the recovery I just went as slow as I felt necessary to get my breath back in check for the next rep, was around 8:30-9 min mile pace in them. Then a 15 min cooldown. I was hitting about 185 on my last rep, and during my 15 min cool down was back to an average 150bpm.
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Strides ar good fun. The key is to accelerate and decelerate slowly, so don''t do 30s hard dash but build up to peak speed, hold for like 20secxodns, then slow back down to easy pace. Hard accelerating/decelerating is liekly to cause injury which goes against the whole tho of these stride which helps give your legs the high turnover without the stress of longer intervals.
 
D.P. said:
Strides ar good fun. The key is to accelerate and decelerate slowly, so don''t do 30s hard dash but build up to peak speed, hold for like 20secxodns, then slow back down to easy pace. Hard accelerating/decelerating is liekly to cause injury which goes against the whole tho of these stride which helps give your legs the high turnover without the stress of longer intervals.
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Good point and I should have been clearer, I was building to the pace in the first 5ish seconds then after the timer beeped to say "recover" I eased off till at the right pace.
 
Itchytrigg thanks for the info,
I injected 8x30s dashes(felt like 25% faster) into evening 45min run and they were not very discernible in the HR/speed logs

hs2_zpsaquyt3eh.jpg~original


this is with a polar blue-tooth / endomondo / Nokia phone.
lower picture is a zoom on one section of chart, with time on x-axis

I had noted lack of smoothness of the charts from this combo before,
anyone like to comment on what they see.
The HR seems to be artificially capped about 155, and I am curious if HR is genuinely this erratic :D

this was about 9km over total 45mins, and on reflection some of the pace rates eg 1min/km are wrong !
maybe try again with Sport Tracker ? or buy endomondo pro ?
 
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Thanks, I now transferred data as gpx to strava - same segment seems a lot smoother on hr
so I guess I need to load the gpx into an excel spread sheet and find out what it looks like ? who is telling the truth
I will also replace HR battery too and check connections.

hs3_zpsctxmlau4.jpg~original
 
A polar bluetooth 2. (strap)

I subsequently found a couple of articles
hardware-for-hrv-what-sensor-should-you-use
Polar How R-R Data is Filtered
heart-rate-variability-a-primer which (big surprise to me) show how much variability there can be in the beat frequency there is

These quotes interesting
For this minute of data, RR interval values range between 832 and 1094 milliseconds. We can compute the instantaneous heart rate simply as:
$$HR = \frac{60 \times 1000}{RR}$$
The instantaneous heart rate in this case gives us a range between 55 and 72 beats per minute.

Clinical practice recommends 5 minutes of data to be used for features extraction, however in the recent years more and more work was able to show that much shorter windows provide equivalence, and more practical 60 seconds recordings are sufficient [5], especially when we look at time domain features.
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I think my/the Endomondo graphs are wrong, but looking at the raw/gpx data in excel (loads directly as xml file!) , there are hr samples about every two seconds, and looked like below, did a moving average in red.
I'll try the algorithm from the last ref - but as I say, I am wondering what the significance of any measures over a short period really is

hs4_zps08oyjxj6.jpg~original


the article does not seem to compare 'accuracy' of wrist vs strap (but would have thought an electrical/strap measure would be more accurate - moving arms around as you run must impact wrist measure ?)
 
The wrist based optical HRM are generally not as accurate as the chest-strap ECG monitors. The scosche rhythm+ is supposedly one of the better optical systems, even there you need to put it around your forearm/elbow and not wrist.


I sometimes get issues with my Garmin HRM strap. Its important to make the contacts wet fore you start, when the humidity is low i use an elector-conductive adhesive which helps the signal no end. You also have to be careful hen its really dry and you have synthetic t-shorts, although that is hard to avoid. I wash the strap after every run in hot water and try to put it in the laundry every week to stop sweat accumulating. Also when the battery gets low you can get some funky readings.

I've also found that even if you take care of all of the above ocne thw strap get to a certain age it just doesn't work very well and you get more wonky readings. I'm on my 3rd strap in 14 months.


However, people tend to say the Polar straps are much better than Garmin and often reccomend Garmin users to attach the garmin monitor to a Polar strap.



What do your reading look like on the watch when running?
 
Done at 1:30:51 and a truck load of PBs for me to boot. Linky

Was an interesting course, lots of ups and downs giving about 700ft of climbing. Slight confusion in the line up, I had an orange bib so lined up in that zone which was weird as the guy at the front was the sub 1:45hr marker but I'd said 1:35 for the race, apparently the color meant I go in front of the marker....oh well, steady start and meant I was overtaking the whole race and never got passed by anyone which was nice.

About 5 miles in saw a few deer cross the course, cute, then the rest of the stampede came with several stags too! Thankfully the runners were aware (and marshals near by spotted the risk) and stopped whilst they crossed and nobody was injured but was a surreal sight.

So tired now, I think I'll probably be passed out on the sofa in the next hour or so!
 
Thanks both, the downhill finish certainly helped though after the initial drop it didn't feel much better than a flat but managed to keep digging deep till I crossed the line.

It also helps I disable duration on my watch for the race (have pace, distance and HR) so when I could first see the timing board it was a boost to not give up.
 
Just had s closer look on Strava. Damn, that start looks brutal. OK you got fresh legs but that's going to tire you out by mile 1. Looks like very good pacing
 
It's real gradual climbing then a short sharp peak at the end, I guess the fresh legs just shrugged it off as it never really stuck in my mind, I thought i'd not included enough hil training this time round but I guess I did just enough.

The last "big" climb was in mile 8, at least it stuck in my mind more though it was fine once I settled into the climb and a small descent the other side is always welcome.

Now just over 4 weeks to get ready for Marlow. It was my first 1/2 last year where I got 1:37 on their 1000ft of climbing, hoping to smash that this year but doubt it will be as quick as this one. Just need to get those hill sessions in.
 
I did my first half marathon at the weekend in 1:54, broke my 10k PB to boot. Very pleased as I only started running in January, ridiculous hills near the start but managed to keep a pretty constant pace, the downhill section afterwards was heaven in comparison though. I did have to stop briefly with a stitch, think I went a bit mad with Lucozade and a gel at the same time.



Anyone else do the Nottingham Robin Hood Marathon?
 
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