January 11, 2024 - All Of One Day

Well, it took me all of one day to fail to write daily in this space. Damn. Well, I'm back today. And one of the themes I'm really working on right now is simply accepting everything as a practice. I'm practicing writing here daily. I have not perfected that, so I move along and continue practicing going forward.

And I forgot to write yesterday because I ran during the time I have set aside to write instead. It's not a time I normally run, but I had an aerobic threshold drift test on my training plan to do and wanted to do it during a comfortable weather window. So that's what I did. I think I'm okay with putting actually running ahead of writing about running. 

This was the second time I've done the aerobic threshold drift test. And the second time it did not go correctly. The idea is to run for 60 minutes (after a long 15-20 minute warm up) trying to hold a target heart rate believed to be one's approximate aerobic threshold heart rate. If done at the correct heart rate, the data should then show that for the given heart rate, the pace drifts down by about 3-5% from the first 30 minutes to the second 30 minutes. 

When I first tried this last week, I targeted a heart rate of 140 beats per minute. That was WAY off. The calculated drift was a negative 3.5%! Basically, I got faster in the second half for the given effort level. I had run way to easy. This was interesting for a couple reasons. One, 140BPM is what the MAF formula would suggest for me as an aerobic threshold even adding in the extra 5BPMs suggested under the formula for someone having run several years without injury. Two, when preparing for the test, the prompt given is to run at an effort that is truly conversational e.g. multi-sentence conversations can be held. I figured 140 was about right, but it turned out to be wrong.

Yesterday I tried again, this time targeting 147BPM. This time, the drift was actually positive. But only a positive 1.3%, well short of the 3-5% targeted. And even that's a bit overstated as I had to run a couple minutes in thick grass to avoid traffic in the second 30 minutes. I'm closer, but still a bit away from having a good sense of my aerobic threshold heart rate.

I'll try again next week, targeting 152BPM. I have a feeling this is gonna be a pretty good target (though I also thought 147 would end up overshooting.) 

This has been an interesting exercise even if I haven't landed on a good number yet. I've often wondered if some of my long runs were at too high an effort, sometimes finding their way into the high 140s and low 150s. It seems that was an unwarranted concern and I should feel absolutely fine running easy and long runs in this space.

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