HRM's & Such

Hodgie-san wrote:

I did not intend to "write marius off" I enjoy his website which is service to the running community & I certainly respect him as an athlete.

Sorry Hodgie, I never meant to imply that you had done any such thing. I was referring to the post by "Nirvana", not your post. You showed nothing but respect to Marius.

Yes, you are missing the point. They're both world-class runners. They have different training philosophies on this subject. They both have a good point. There is no need to set them up in some kind of polar opposition.

By your logic, if Hodgie ever got injured or overtrained during his career then HIS methods must have been just plain wrong as well. That is an absurd oversimplification. Marius knows how to build a base as well. I'm pretty sure he knows how to listen to his body too.

Your value judgement regarding 2:10 vs. 13:09 is noted. Unfortunately, merely restating a personal opinion does not constitute debate.

Hey Average Joe, shush yourself, my post was in response to John the Elder. I've shown nothing but respect for both Hodgie and Marius.

Nirvana wrote:

Hey Average Joe, shush yourself, my post was in response to John the Elder. I've shown nothing but respect for both Hodgie and Marius.

Sorry. I misunderstood the intent of your post. Reading back now the post to which you were responding, I see that you were not making a dopey slam, but rather were responding to one. My apologies.

Mr. Hodge, as someone who has a great deal of respect for what you accomplished as a runner, I was wondering if, looking back, how you would have trained differently if you could do it all over again? Heart rate monitors are terrific training tools if used properly. They have a bad rep with runners who hammer becuase their are veiwed as a cop out and an excuse to run less or run slower. This is a misnomer. I would agree with you that there is value in training how you feel, especially during the base building period. In general, I think many runners from your era (Rodgers, Meyer, Vitale, Burfoot, etc.)ran well due to the sheer volume of work (mileage) on a consistent basis year after year. That work ethic is often lacking in today's runners. But in hindsight, I was wondering if you would have trained any differently if you have the change to do it all over again?

You must not have read the training of Carlos Lopes. Which is on Marius' site.

So you think it couldn't be the early morning 13 mile warmup runs up steep hills.

When did Coe ever run 4 sessions of 20x 400 meters each week, two of these up hills? Probably.... never.

I agree we all probably have a bias one way or the other, but the material provided by Marius on his site is certainly excellent, and the best I have seen compared to anywhere else.

What I see from the training there is totally different than what you do.

You seem to be very track oriented. Like the intervals are totally "it". And your program is not very precise. "Do some of this, and some of that, and it doesn't matter how you do it."

Perhaps it doesn't matter what your results are either.

[quote]I don?t think so.

Nope.

Regarding HRM:

At the age of 37 I was involved in a car accident and required knee surgery (patella tendon). I did not run for 7 months. When I began to run again I experimented with a HRM.

It was kind of fun, like a toy but I suppose I'm just not savvy enough to see the value in it.

Average man, yes I agreed. They are both world class athletes and they both have different training philosophies.

I'm not trying to set up any kind of opposition between the two, all I'm trying to say is that the HRM is not necessary when building a base. It is best to go by FEEL. There are a few individuals here who claim that the HRM could help you determine whether you're over-training or not.

I used Marius example to illustrate that the HRM is useless and the 2:10 to prove to you that it could be done without the gadget.

Hodgie-san wrote:

Nope.

Regarding HRM:

At the age of 37 I was involved in a car accident and required knee surgery (patella tendon). I did not run for 7 months. When I began to run again I experimented with a HRM.

It was kind of fun, like a toy but I suppose I'm just not savvy enough to see the value in it.

I found it to be a neat toy as well. My mother even bought me a real fancy one for Christmas one year. However, I found that I spent too much time looking at the numbers on the watch and then worrying about them. I found that the numbers could easily jump a bunch while running at the same pace/effort if you started daydreaming about races to come or what you wanted to do to that hot-looking babe sunbathing in the park.

Differences in temperature really affected it as well. When it was cold out, I was running at perceived tempo-effort in order to maintain easy run status as shown by the monitor.

Someone hit the nail on the head when they suggested that people use them as an excuse to run slower or less distance. In theory, if you use a monitor and run slower, you should be running farther. If you read John Parker's "Heart Rate Training for the Compleat Idiot," he has you running long and slow or short and fast. Sounds like normal training to me.

Again, it's a tool. You can do the same thing without the monitor. Using Hodgie-san's 5 and 10 mile days as an example, if you can't come back the next day and run 5/10 and the next day and so on, you are probably running too hard and need to back off. Remember, this is base-building we're talking about. You should be able to repeat the workouts day after day.

Hector Matos wrote:

I used Marius example to illustrate that the HRM is useless

It does not illustrate that an HRM is useless. It merely illustrates that it is possible to overtrain while using an HRM. I could have told you that. Any tool can be misused or ignored. And sometimes even when you do things properly, bad things happen.

All of this is assuming that Marius' recent less-than-hoped-for performances were due to overtraining - conjecture on your part.

and the 2:10 to prove to you that it could be done without the gadget.

Why did you feel this needed proving? Did anyone claim it could not be done without a gadget? Plenty of sub-2:10s were run in the days before HRMs. Plenty of sub-2:10s have been run without the runner wearing a wristwatch either. Abebe Bikila won an Olympic gold medal without shoes. Does this mean we should all run barefoot?

HRMs can be a useful tool if used smartly... or you can be a dumb-ass and over-train while wearing your $100+ gadget just as easily as you can be a dumb-ass and over-train without it. End of story.

Yep.

Yo Hodgie, i realize you hate HR moniors but I'm telling you--they are GREAT tools in learning to listen to your body. Maybe we're not all as genius as you, and sometimes we misinterpret what our body is telling us. Until I got my HR monitor I was convinced that my easy pace was 6:20-6:40 a mile. Now I realize that it is more like 7:20-7:40. I was once burned out, and now I should see much better results. It is a great tool for discovering what the term 'easy' feels like. After all, easy is just a word. You have to KNOW what it is before you can train smartly. And the HRM has helped me learn this.

Yo Guitarrrr,

No hate in me. Strap on that HRM & slow down the pace, discover easy.

Ya-hooo!

It's simple HRM is like a hearing aid. Some people can not

hear what their body is saying. Hodgie says my hearing is

fine and I listen to what my body is telling me.

Any chance you think (wink wink) you could apply for

handicap plates if you wear a HRM

I've never spent any substantial length of time building a base. I'm worried about spending a lot of time without ANY fast running.

Questions:

1. Will I ever be able to run faster than 6 min mile again after a period of many months of sloooow ploding? I need to hear testimony of this.

2. Can I throw in a fartlek somewhere in the week so I don't have to be so worried that my legs will forget how to move at a respectable speed?

Average_Joe wrote:

Abebe Bikila won an Olympic gold medal without shoes. Does this mean we should all run barefoot?

Yes!!! : )

Bobby knows me from way back when he first pointed out to me how easy it was to amass 100m per week. I see HRMs as only helping us to stay within ourselves on 90-120+ minute runs and to slow down enough on total recovery days. I'm now playing with one but only occasionally. Most days I go with the ZEN feel of pace (Ah, Tokeisho Seko !). Hodgie is the zen-san master.

I tried a HRM a few years back and can't understand the attraction. The promised performance improvements never happened and the only effect I saw it having was that it took me ten more minutes to get out the door because I had to wet the nodes, strap the thing on, bang it for a few minutes to get it to register numbers, then stop during runs when it showed my HR had jumped to 286 or dropped to 38 and bang it some more to get an accurate number on it again.

The Kenyans, Ethiopians, Morrocans and Japanese are currently the best distance runners on earth and don't use them, from what I can tell. Marius' "we're not as good and need a techno-advantage" argument sounds good until you consider that western runners of 15-20 years ago were running better without them than today's runners are, Marius being a notable exception. And for the life of me I can't figure out why anyone, myself included, would get suckered into paying over $100 for a gadget that doesn't tell you anything you can't learn from your fingers and a $6 wristwatch.