Road Racing and Training Thread - Week Ending 10/27/19

angryjohnny wrote:

Question for the heart rate folks - my resting heart rate has been averaging around 55 lately. Before Berlin it averaged around 45 and on some nights would dip down below 40 with some regularity. Does this mean I’m not fully recovered? Note that this is based on the garmin wrist monitor so maybe the data is suspect, but it seems like a pretty stable trend.

AJ - This same situation just happened to me although I wasn't coming off a marathon. My RHR is also typically in the low 40's sometimes dipping into the high 30's. I also started averaging around 55 and a few days after that I had a nasty sore throat and sinus problem. I think it was probably a sign that my body was already fighting some bug even though the symptoms hadn't hit yet.

I think that that wrist HRM's are fairly accurate at rest. They just fall apart when you start doing stuff. At least that's what I read somewhere (don't recall source).

The Stone Cutter wrote:

I am in the same boat, BHViking. My right soleus was not happy with me about 3 miles into Monday’s easy run. My best guess is the amount of hill work on Sunday’s long run was an alien stimulus, making the soleus grumpy.

Did a lot of foam rolling, lacrosse ball work, and slathered Biofreeze all over my legs the last two nights. I always tell my athletes it’s better to be standing on the starting line of a marathon at 95% fitness than watching from the sidelines at 105% fitness but injured.

Like you, I am taking it as a blessing in disguise.

What terrible luck! At least it sounds minor for both of us. I hadn't thought about biofreeze. Thanks for the advice. I think I'll stop at Walgreens and get some. I forgot to mention I had also foam rolled and used a tennis ball. I love the attitude about sacrificing some fitness. I too feel like I could run now but if I had a choice of still feeling a tiny bit of "bad soreness" for the next couple of weeks vs feeling 100% this weekend, I'll take even a few more days off if that's that trade off!!

Thanks guys. Wife has an ekg thing on her phone that measures finger pulse. I’ll try using that tonight. I don’t think it’s illness as I’ve been in the mid 50s for a while now and I haven’t come down with anything. I don’t think it’s sleep either. My sleep was pretty crappy before Berlin. It’s actually been much better the last month.

I’m leaning towards not being full recovered. Since Indy is in 10 days I suppose I should probably start tapering soon.

I also have the Garmin wrist heart rate thingie. (that's the technical term).

Like others, I've found the wrist-based HR to be decent if not perfect when resting; for running I use the chest strap.

Personally, I think one's HR on any one day can be distorted by other factors - for example, my HR usually drops the lowest when I'm falling asleep. But if I've taken a hot shower right before bed, my HR is a bit more elevated that evening, and it shows in the HR chart the next day.

I also find that the HR function doesn't always seem to catch my lowest HR. I regularly drop to 37 or 38 BPM when I'm reading in bed and about to nod off, and the Garmin will show that on my watch. And then I check the next day and my resting HR from the day before was 44 BPM....

However, I do think that a trend of several days elevation above what you normally see is worth considering. I would never rely on HR absolutely - I just consider it as one factor among others. If your HR is showing as elevated for a few days AND you feel a bit off then yes, I think you can conclude from all of those that you are not quite recovered.

Yes, that is the technical term! (Garmin wrist heart rate thingie)

From Garmin's website on how they report RHR:

"For users that wear their watch while sleeping, the watch will read and record the average of all readings while they sleep, excluding periods where any steps were detected or the measured heart rate falls outside reasonable bounds. A minimum of four hours of sleep time is required to register a reading."

The biggest factor that affects my reported RHR is alcohol consumption. If you look at my RHR history on my Garmin, you can positively identify what nights I drank alcohol. My RHR is significantly higher following a night of drinking and it's proportional to how much I "overdid it".

4 - 6 beers: 50+ bpm

10ish beers: 60+ bpm

Full day of tailgating (lost count of # of beers): 70+ bpm

BHViking wrote:

The biggest factor that affects my reported RHR is alcohol consumption. If you look at my RHR history on my Garmin, you can positively identify what nights I drank alcohol. My RHR is significantly higher following a night of drinking and it's proportional to how much I "overdid it".

4 - 6 beers: 50+ bpm

10ish beers: 60+ bpm

Full day of tailgating (lost count of # of beers): 70+ bpm

Legendary post. I think at least Smoove, RRR, and Coach Jeff could corroborate this data if called upon.

Just some comments from this week’s thread:

JQ: Good luck at running sub-2:40 at NYC! Enjoy the race as you have done the hard work with your training.

NiceGuy: Solid week of training and congratulations on the weekly mileage PR.

Slo-twitch: Very impressive set of workouts and especially that progression long run. Can’t wait to see you crush that sub-2:29 at Indy.

Coach Jeff: Nice Q workout with 18K@MP effort. Very impressive long run!

RRR: Wishing you a speedy and full recovery before Indy.

GT: Flying on those 1600/300 repeats and congratulations on the Strava 10K PR.

AJ: Congratulation on your 2:40:28 negative split at Berlin! Monster race… good luck with the B2B for Indy!

SC: Nice set of workouts. I think I will be going for sub-2:40 at CIM with a backup plan to just PR (sub-2:42)

Darkwave: Congratulations on the half marathon PR from last week. Strong result given your recent health concerns with asthma and ulcerative colitis flareups.

Still improving: Very smart to stay away from running to let your injury fully heal up.

Hoggy jobber: Nice consistent week of training.

Highhoppingworm: Welcome to the RR&T thread. Very solid long run there with a lot of MP miles.. I think you may be able to go for a faster time than just sub-3.

Outsiderunner: Killing it with your tempo run workouts! Good to see you training and looking as strong as ever.

Sub-6: Congratulations on a monster race at Chicago!

Statfanatic: Impressive race followed by a quality long run the day after.

BHViking: Nice set of quality workouts mixed in with a lot of easy running.

Pappy: Hope your ankle is back to 100% before your turkey trot races.

RGM: Congratulations on your sub-3 at Chicago and good luck in your 50 mile race!

GNR1: Congratulations on the huge PR at the half marathon race and 3rd overall. You definitely have a great chance at a PR at CIM.

Guy Broman: Good to hear your ankle appears to be healed up.

Legendre: Will be interesting to follow your training as your goal HMP is about the same as the HM I just ran.

Pewow: Welcome back to the thread and training..

Thanks, Bruin. Great to see you back.

Bruin1996 wrote:

Long Beach Half Marathon 1:15:14 PR

Splits: 5:45, 5:44, 5:40, 5:48, 5:41, 5:39, 5:42, 5:45, 5:48, 5:42, 5:43, 5:35, 5:30, 5:01 (last 0.2

I felt I ran a fairly evenly paced race with a fast finish but probably did not run the tangents optimally as I ran 13.24 miles according to my GPS/Stryd footpod.

@Bruin: Congrats for the HM PR! Impressive how many quality work you manage to do on 90+ mpw.

I was wondering if you used Stryd to help with pacing?

I find that Stryd won't give you perfect distance but main benefit is huge consistency. Previous version I had overestimated distance by 1-2%, current one underestimates around 1%. But it's much more consistent than GPS.

The Stone Cutter wrote:

BHViking wrote:

The biggest factor that affects my reported RHR is alcohol consumption. If you look at my RHR history on my Garmin, you can positively identify what nights I drank alcohol. My RHR is significantly higher following a night of drinking and it's proportional to how much I "overdid it".

4 - 6 beers: 50+ bpm

10ish beers: 60+ bpm

Full day of tailgating (lost count of # of beers): 70+ bpm

Legendary post. I think at least Smoove, RRR, and Coach Jeff could corroborate this data if called upon.

Sorry, but I don't have any control data to serve as a baseline. ??

AJ (and others): On the Connect IQ store, you can download a "data field" called "Resting Heart Rate." If you wear the strap to bed, it will grab the lowest reading rather than an average reading.

There's also a downloadable data field called "Beers" that will calculate how many beers you earned over the course of your run. You can try it, but I find it mostly underestimates. By a lot. ?

Thanks folks. I had no idea you could download additional fields (and faces) for the garmin. Good tip.

Good to hear from you Bruin.

JQ - Good luck this weekend. You're ready. (PS...I can tell you're still young because you're willing to take domestic red eyes)

Slo - Looking ready for prime time.

AJ - I don't know the answer on the heart rate thing but that does seem like a big discrepency. I always expected the illness or recovery bump to be like 10% higher rather than 25%, but I guess I don't know because I haven't tracked that sort of thing.

Stone - continuing to come along nicely. Sounds like you took the right steps to keep this week's ache hiccup from going full bore injury burp.

Outsiderunner - Good to see the swagger coming back.

Worm - Certainly a lot of potential there for sub3 or better in 17 weeks. I will just encourage patience if you're relatively new to distance running, but yeah...lots of potential.

RGM - You seem to be bouncing back quick from Chicago. Can't imagine wanting to do a 50miler so soon after but I might be a wimp. (I'm also on the team that doesn't love Vaporfly when running slower, but I know it's not a unanimous vote). As for the quote, as random as they may seem I do usually try to have them fit thematically with the week. This week felt like a cop out, but both workouts were from the article with that title, so it was pretty on the nose.

GNR1 and Bruin - Congrats on the great half results.

Guy & Pewow - Good to see you back at it.

Cocoon - Careful with that hip flexor pain plus 'need to up the mileage' combo.

Coyote - Sorry to hear about the troubles. Hope you're back sooner than later.

Thoughtsleader - Sorry I didn't get back to you about the watch thing. It was a busy week last week with travel and then out of town friends visiting (their flight landed 20 minutes after mine) and I wasn't 100% sure where it was or if I had the charger which I wanted to confirm before I followed up. I actually think you'll end up better off with a Timex for races than the old TomTom anyway. Especially for big city races with buildings I manual split my GPS watch instead of trusting GPS (my watch said I ran 27 miles at Chicago last year), and TomTom thought they were being cutting edge in 2013 by making the lap button a touch sensitive portion to the side of the screen, but really it's just a PITA that doesn't register touches half the time, especially when wet (like...even just sweat).

Napper - showing your strength game is on point returning to the 20milers already. Excited to see what you can do with some risk taking in a race. Somehow you made Chicago seem almost too straightforward. And thanks - I feel like whatever wheels I have are a relatively recent discovery. Also for completeness sake, I will note only one of those two were track workouts. I know some people can do it, but 7miles is too long for me to focus continuously on the track, so that was a road run with watch beeps for the laps.

Gordon Tremeshko wrote:

Thoughtsleader - Sorry I didn't get back to you about the watch thing. It was a busy week last week with travel and then out of town friends visiting (their flight landed 20 minutes after mine) and I wasn't 100% sure where it was or if I had the charger which I wanted to confirm before I followed up. I actually think you'll end up better off with a Timex for races than the old TomTom anyway. Especially for big city races with buildings I manual split my GPS watch instead of trusting GPS (my watch said I ran 27 miles at Chicago last year), and TomTom thought they were being cutting edge in 2013 by making the lap button a touch sensitive portion to the side of the screen, but really it's just a PITA that doesn't register touches half the time, especially when wet (like...even just sweat).

Thanks, good to know. First trial should be Turkey Trot 5K (weather permitting). I think I'm actually cool with less data. Having to do the mental math could be a good distraction for me in a lot of these races. And the ease of use is really what I want, so avoiding any potential complications that I am 2/2 in getting in my marathons is the way to go. I'm sorry I'm out of town for NYC this weekend, but weather looks great and excited to see how everyone does.

Happy Halloween!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IC7qaNr7I

Whoa, a DSP sighting!!

DSP is alive and in the house! This makes me happier than OR at the end of a true flyer.

Gordon Tremeshko wrote:

Outsiderunner - Good to see the swagger coming back.

Indeed...we all need some swagger.

angryjohnny wrote:

DSP is alive and in the house! This makes me happier than OR at the end of a true flyer.

Post of the week.

The Stone Cutter wrote:

BHViking wrote:

The biggest factor that affects my reported RHR is alcohol consumption. If you look at my RHR history on my Garmin, you can positively identify what nights I drank alcohol. My RHR is significantly higher following a night of drinking and it's proportional to how much I "overdid it".

4 - 6 beers: 50+ bpm

10ish beers: 60+ bpm

Full day of tailgating (lost count of # of beers): 70+ bpm

Legendary post. I think at least Smoove, RRR, and Coach Jeff could corroborate this data if called upon.

My morning HR (taken manually) will drop 10 BPM + when I go into sober mode ... almost immediate.

RRR is making it.... Doc gave me a short cycle of Prednisone to try to kill this thing out. Luckily the nerve pain is gone now just dealing with some lingering soreness and tightness ... mix of Run/Bike/ and elliptical this week.

Hope to be 85-90% by Gun time