Saturday, October 20, 2018

Packing them in

It truly is perverse the number of running events that are happening on any given week, disturbing traffic, startling blue penguins and increasing the production of medals and technical t-shirts. Every weekend there is something on somewhere attracting hundreds of people, well trained and bristling ready for action. Although there are probably those freak-of-nature amateur athletes who compete every week, it's not healthy to push your body to its competitive limit on such a regular basis. And even if you did, the general thought is that you wouldn't improve much because you wouldn't give your body the appropriate variety of runs to stimulate the body to respond adaptively. 

After I had finished the North Shore Marathon on 3 September, all I had in store for myself competitively was the half marathon series, five events around the greater Auckland area, each a couple of months apart. I liked the idea of a series so I could see my progress, and especially whether I could eventually challenge the 1:30 threshold (i.e. doing a half marathon in under 90 minutes). When I entered it in May it still seemed like there was a wall at 1:35 that I wouldn't be able to get passed, but back on 12 August I surprised myself with getting 1:31 at Millwater. I knew if my fitness continued I'd be able to challenge 1:30 sooner than I thought. Then of course the marathon rolled round and I had to recover. Initially I opted against entering the Auckland Marathon (28 October) just so I wouldn't have too many events but then some bait was thrown into the water. Asics offered a chance to "join Team Asics" and  get 20% off the entry fee as well as an Asics pack if I was one of the 20 people chosen on 30 September. I put my name down with some trepidation. I was leaving it up to others to decide if I were running. But I liked trying something different and left fate to intervene.

In the meantime, I picked up my training again and got into a good rhythm. One great thing about having just run a marathon is that your body doesn't know if there is another one coming up and prepares just in case you are stupid enough to run again. So you get a fitness boost in the aftermath, even though other parts of your body might be still recovering. Three weeks after the marathon I ran my usual Parkrun at Cornwall Park and immediately smashed my previous record by 50 seconds (this is quite a lot). Parkrun, for the unacquainted, is a free, timed 5km run every Saturday morning all over the world. Auckland has five different ones attracting hundreds every weekend. Previously in the peak of my fitness I'd always struggled to get under 21 minutes at Cornwall Park. After the marathon last year I did 21:22; then in May this year I got 21:14, a month later while feeling unstoppably fit and fast, I regressed to 21:36, then in July I made slight progress to 21:10 in August. Considering one of my stated goals for the year was breaking 20:00 at Cornwall Park, I was clearly "doing it wrong" or just underestimated the challenge of it. And then I ran the marathon and 20 days later ran the Cornwall Park parkrun in 20:20. That's how significant a marathon is in pushing you to a new level. (I ran a parkrun this morning and registered 20:26 to show it wasn't a flash in the pan.) I still have to find a way to clip off another 4 seconds from each kilometre and then it's mission accomplished! 

30 September was quick approaching and the decision of whether to run Auckland Marathon was about to come clear, but 30 September was significant for another reason. It was the day of the first event of the half marathon series, the Devonport Half. I'd never run this before and naively thought I'd be able to match my Millwater time. It was considerably hillier and had more people than I'd ever imagined. With the hills, it has a "smack in the face" called Huia Street in the first kilometre which is a short, steep hill, and in the 18th kilometre has a "winding smack to the guts" in climbing Northhead. It's not a simple course. But a bigger factor for me was that because I delayed going to the start area, I began stuck in a huge mass of runners with very little space to move, nowhere near my usual pace group. It took about half the race of first dodging and weaving and then moving up to each cluster of runners and passing them to get to runners I could pace with. It was at the 11th kilometre I bumped into Jonathan, a regular run club runner who is also in the series. I knew his pace (he's second fastest and a great pacer for me). So I kept with him for about a kilometre before pushing onwards and caught another fast bunch. In the end, I finished 1:33:44, which though slower than my expectation I was pretty pleased with. It wasn't the improvement but more of a consolidation. It was my second time under 1:35 but on a difficult course. 

The next day was my birthday and so was the news that everyone who wanted to join had been accepted for Team Asics. I gave myself the gift of a marathon and now I'm running in the marathon in just 8 days. With that, and bearing in mind what I said about not competing all the time, in the six months until the end of October, I would have run 2 marathons, 3 half marathons, two 10km races and five 5km races, twelve events, which works out at almost one every two weeks, which can only be regarded as overdoing it. The body has held up remarkably well and I've enjoyed racing. Racing is quite enlivening for the mind and soul. 

One side issue is the birthday gift from my wife, a smartwatch, the Fitbit Ionic. Now that I've had it for almost two months, I've observed some interesting things, especially about resting heart rate. When I started using my it my resting heart rate was in the middle of a lower period, as low as 46 beats a minute. But with a lack of sleep and a busy week, it rose. After the marathon, it rose still. When I drank alcohol, it'd rise. When I fell and had wounds, it was higher until they healed. The peak of all these factors coincided with my highest resting heart rate of 58 beats a minute. I've had a good week limiting these factors and now it's back down to 50. I'd like to get it back well into the 40s by the time of my marathon. 

Another interesting thing is observing my heart rate during exercise. It is rather random. When I'm exerting myself it can be high or low. When I'm taking it easy it can be high or low. In fact, it sometimes has this "flicking the switch" moment, where my heart rate mid-run increases or decreases by as much as 40 beats a minute. And I don't feel a thing. I haven't had any symptom on the run apart from increasing fatigue which is the same sign any runner should get as they run more. Because my family does have something of a curse in the cardiac department, it might have to be something I get a doctor to look at. It could be just a gremlin in the device but is probably not coincidental. 

8 days to this whimsical marathon, I'm going to be watching my heart!

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