Today marks the first day I ran 2 laps around my neighborhood, straight, with no breaks. Early in my training I was trying to keep my heart rate below 150 so I constantly stopped to walk in order to get it down. My experienced triathlon and runner friends said that was plain wrong. The right way was just to run or jog really, really slowly. My problem was that I was in such piss poor shape that I still couldn’t get my rate down.
I took two days off and ran tonight. My goal was to run straight through and more or less ignore my heart rate. Well, I did it. My pace is still a week bit slow, 11:44 minutes/mile but at least my heart rate was steady and I stayed at it. Hopefully as I train more my heart won’t have to work so hard.
My goal for the end of May is to do four laps around the block, which will equal about 5.74 miles, mostly what I need to do for the last leg of the triathlon. Would be nice to get to the point of being able to do a half-marathon by the end of June but that’s not really where I should be focusing.
I’m not worried about the biking. I still need work at my swimming. When my coach makes me do drills like “make fists” I tend to have a hard time at it. Still, I mostly feel strong in the water as my being more or less overweight seems to matter less there.
I am going to try and do the same 2 laps tomorrow and take off Friday.