On the rare occasion I go to a pub I'm probably going to talk about training, trail running and all the cool lizards we see...
Speaking of, I haven't been running that much since before we went to Asia. So, it's been about six weeks since I did much training and even then it was sporadic.
We travelled through four countries in 17 days and then I came home and promptly got super sick. For days I barely left the house. Forget about running, I was trying to avoid having to walk further than the kitchen or bathroom from my bed.
So when @new.things, that running-loving partner of mine said he wanted to do a speed work session in the afternoon time slot when we usually do a meandering bushwalk, I thought, "What thr hell. Let's give it a go!".
This is a photo of my running pace, as a graph. It shows that I jogged most of the way to our speed work track in the bush.
Then I did some sprints (see sharp spikes up) and some walking at each end to recover (sharp spikes down and the low volume of colour at the bottom).
Between about 17 - 22 minutes I just walked very slowly as I could tell I was pretty much done but wanted to let Brad finish his session the way he'd planned.
Then, with my heart rate below 100, I snuck one more sprint in as Brad did hia last one and then we slowly jogged home together.
4:15/km pace is pretty good given that I really haven't done any speed work, speed play or speed anything for probably more than two months.
I left my watch running the entire time (though I may have paused it when Mister saw a Dragon lizard and wanted to take a photo, but I can't actually remember 🤔) and so the total of walking, running and jogging came to 3.5km.
That's pretty good given a few weeks ago I couldn't even walk fast enough to complete a parkrun.
What interested me a lot was seeing this graph of my heart rate. Remember how ai mentioned above that I jogged slowly to and from the speed work area? So you see how my heart rate is at its highest there?
Weird hey?
Either my wrist watch (where my heart rate is being recorded) is rubbish - which is totally possible given that people who know more about such things are always insisting that one must wear a chest strap to record heart rate properly.
Or my body is still trying to recover from the ridiculously awful flu I had just a few weeks back, and the very slow walking I did before and after each sprint lap was enough to help my heart out.
And finally, a fun picture showing my cadence. For those who don't know this word, cadence is a measure of how many steps you are doing per minute.
When you walk, as I was doing for that big chunk between minutes 17 - 22 during this session, the number is lower, around 90-100 ish steps per min - spm, seen there in red.
When I run fast, as I did five short times between minutes 7 - 27, my cadence was around 190-200 spm. You can see the spikes there in purple.
And the jogging at the beginning and the end? That's all the dots of other colours between the red and the purple.
It doesn't mean a whole lot of anything unless I split my training session up to separate the walking from the running, but the coloured dots are pretty, right? 😂
But in all seriousness, I was happy to get out there again. I was happy to practise running with faster cadence again. And the best bit of all?
I did the entire lot breathing only through my nose. 😄
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{All photos, except the dragon lizard, came from my Garmin Connect App. Thanks Garmin for the stats!! The lizard was photographically captured by @new.things and used here with his permission.}