This week should have started with a 10 mile race, the Lewes Downland 10. But last week’s experience told me quite plainly that I’m a bit short on endurance miles, so instead it was a longer, slower, slog on the South Downs of around two and half hours. I felt surprisingly good. Next week’s 20 mile race will be a stronger indicator of what sort of long-distance capacity I have right now.<\/p>\n
This week also saw the start of my participation in some research at Brighton University. A team of sports scientists there are looking at muscle damage after running a marathon (the Beachy Head marathon), and part of this will test the effectiveness of a fruit drink supplement on recovery from such damage.
\nThe testing on Tuesday was hard, it involved a lactate threshold test, followed by a max heart rate test. The max test was carried out on a treadmill and used gradient rather than increasing speed to build heart rate.
\nI’ve been tested like this before and been unable to reach as high a heart rate as I can see in track or road training sessions. I think there is obviously a self-governing safety factor at play here; nobody wants to fly off the back of a treadmill at high speed, and that is what is in the back of the mind when pushing harder and harder to exhaustion and loosing form in a spectacular fashion. There is also the motivation factor: running flat out is much more likely when chasing a stop watch or training colleague than it is when wired and piped up on a treadmill. The fact that the reward for completing each section is an increase in gradient doesn’t help much either.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it was fascinating stuff and I’m looking forward to the next session which will measure running economy and pain threshold amongst other things, including electric muscle stimulation \u2014 hmmm.<\/p>\n
As for the rest of the running week, I managed just the one barefoot run on the road and some good quality miles.<\/p>\n
Total miles: 34.6
\nBarefoot miles: 2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week should have started with a 10 mile race, the Lewes Downland 10. But last week’s experience told me quite plainly that I’m a bit short on endurance miles, so instead it was a longer, slower, slog on the South Downs of around two and half hours. I felt surprisingly good. Next week’s 20 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[253,315,291],"class_list":["post-1652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-barefoot-running-diaries","tag-beachy-head-marathon","tag-muscle-damage","tag-treadmill","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1652"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1654,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions\/1654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}