Role Mother (and marathoner) Melissa is trying out the Half-Marathon Heart Rate Challenge and documenting it along the way. Here, she talks about the first two weeks. (Check out her intro post and her two-week check-in, full of run/walk/skip/stop/bend over combos.)
Four weeks are in the books for the first wave of heart rate training! How is it going so far? Well, personally I’m resisting the urge to look for results, results, results. All too often in our running, we end constantly searching for some form of immediate improvement and satisfying feedback, and if there is one thing HR training is teaching me, it’s to have patience, patience, and more patience when it comes to evaluating my success with this type of training.
I’m understanding more and more that this is a lesson in delayed gratification, and that some runs won’t even feel like runs at all because I am in a constant battle with getting my rate just right. And guess what? I’m slowly becoming OK with that, and I’m happy to allow a 20-week program to progress just as it should, without trying to over control and mismanage it. I will admit to being a little excited about adding PUs (pick ups) to upcoming runs, just to see if my legs remember how to turn over that quickly, and to see what kind of effect a few moments of speed will have on my heart rate. I took my resting heart rate a few days ago and to my surprise it was much lower than when I took it before starting this program. Not sure what that means, but I’ll take it.
Finally, summer is officially here in my household and that means travel and family schedules that are always up in the air, making me nervous about fitting in four runs per week (with some in unfamiliar settings). I have never run four times per week during the summer months because of the southern heat and humidity, so this will be a whole new season of running for me. I’m hoping the fact my paces are slower will allow my body to not wilt as quickly in the high temps, and the inevitable dehydration recovery I always experience to not be as horrible as it usually is.
We’re 1/5 of the way there BAMRs! Here’s to us hitting the next two weeks of our training with faith, acceptance, and a whole bunch of Nuun tablets.
We’ll check in with Melissa every two weeks to see how she’s running and how she’s feeling, so come back to follow her progress.
I am discovering some of the same:-) Thanks for sharing
Heart rate training is amazing – give it time. I’ve trained with it for the past two years, including my first and second marathons. You will improve, just stick with it. I took 14 minutes off my first marathon. Enjoy your runs and the process.