Well, as a “well done” present to myself after the 10k last week, I made a couple of purchases…\u00a0 First was entry into the Bristol half marathon in September.\u00a0 Second was a heart rate monitor (a cheap one, only abou \u00a320 from Amazon) and a book about heart rate training (Maffetone’s Big Book of Endurance Running).\u00a0 After spending a couple of days reading, I decided to follow the Maffetone training plan to build a good aerobic base for the half marathon.\u00a0 Following his formula, I’ve got a target heart rate of 144bpm for all my runs from now till about the end of August\/beginning of September, when I’ll introduce some speed or tempo running.<\/p>\n
I’ve done all my runs this week at 144bmp, or thereabouts, and I’ve found that at that pace (between 10-13 minute miles depending on heat, length of run, terrain etc) I can pretty much keep running for as long as I want to.\u00a0 I’m also fresh enough to run again the next day, so I went out for 4 runs this week – 2x45min, 1x60min, 1x105min.\u00a0 It’s a very slow pace, but I’m happy to run at that pace because it’s easy, it’s building mileage for the half marathon (something I didn’t do last time I did a half, and I suffered for it), and more importantly, it’s slow enough that I can cover most of my miles barefoot, which was kind of the motivation for starting this training\u00a0method in the first place.<\/p>\n
So, there’s a big increase in mileage this week, but they were all easy miles!<\/p>\n
22(ish) miles<\/p>\n
4.<\/p>\n
14\u00a0miles.<\/p>\n
3.<\/p>\n
Mostly flat, on a mixture of pavement, dirt tracks and road.<\/p>\n
Mixtture of pavement, grass\u00a0and dirt tracks.<\/p>\n
Lunas for one of the runs, I’m aiming to run barefoot only every other day at the moment while my feet adapt.<\/p>\n
Blazing sunshine!\u00a0 Which makes a nice change!<\/p>\n
Absolutely fine, suprisingly!\u00a0 Ran my furthest ever barefoot run this week – 8 miles!\u00a0 This was on a mixture of pavement, grass and dry dirt trails, but even so, I’m very impressed that my feet have come through it absolutely fine!<\/p>\n
None, but I did see two other barefoot runners this week.\u00a0 First time I’ve seen anyone else run barefoot since I started.<\/p>\n
Stepped on a few squishy things and a few painful things this week.\u00a0 But I just carried on and the pain went away after a few seconds!\u00a0 Only had to stop once to pull a thorn out of my sole.<\/p>\n
I’m VERY slow at 144bpm at the moment.\u00a0 My cadence has dropped quite significantly at this pace.\u00a0 If I try to get up to anything neat 180 steps per minute, my heart rate goes up to the 150s.\u00a0 I’m hoping two things – firstly, that it will get easier to bring my cadence up as I (hopefully) get faster at 144bpm, and secondly, that at this pace, the impact forces on my feet are low enough that a low cadence won’t do any damage.<\/p>\n
None.\u00a0 My calves don’t even hurt in the morning after a long run now, I’m going so slowly that it’s really low-impact exercise!<\/p>\n
If you try and do heart rate training, you really have to leave your ego at home!\u00a0 I’ve been overtaken by so many people this week…\u00a0 In the past I’ve treated every training run like a race, if I got overtaken I’d write it off as a bad run.\u00a0 But this is a different approach, the focus is very much on heart rate, and time on your feet.\u00a0 At the moment, the discipline of sticking to 144bpm and the novelty of being able to run so far on a daily basis is enough motivation for me to stick with it.\u00a0 We’ll see how long it lasts though!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, as a “well done” present to myself after the 10k last week, I made a couple of purchases…\u00a0 First was entry into the Bristol half marathon in September.\u00a0 Second was a heart rate monitor (a cheap one, only abou \u00a320 from Amazon) and a book about heart rate training (Maffetone’s Big Book of Endurance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"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":[],"class_list":["post-3114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-barefoot-running-diaries","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114","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\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3217,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions\/3217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runningtrainingplan.com\/runningpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}