Run Forrest, Run

Well maybe not quite of Forrest Gump proportions just yet.  However I am very happy to report that two short easy runs have passed by and no catastrophic collapse of the Achilles has occurred.  I mentioned the first run for a month in the last post.  On waking the next day the important first steps were pretty much pain free.  This was very encouraging as this is when any problems are most noticeable.  So with only one day between I again ventured out on Tuesday lunchtime for gentle run around Melbourne’s Tan Track.  Not all the way around mind you, limiting myself to 20 minutes or thereabouts right at the moment.  It was a lovely day, sunny but pretty cool at 11 Celsius.  This run was even slower than previously at close to 6:00 per kilometre.  The slow pace was not a fitness issue, just a precaution in not wanting to put too much pressure on.  My natural running style (a generous description, I know) is a driving high impact high energy style which definitely takes it’s toll.   It was so hard to move at this pace with intense deliberation as other runners passed by, the competitive devil on my shoulder needling away – “He can’t pass you like that!”,…….

Ego handbrake firmly engaged.

Anyway the really good news is that again no pain was experienced either in the run or the next morning.  So another twenty minutes is on the agenda for tomorrow and I am feeling pretty confident about it, for the first time in a long time.  It’s interesting how the leg muscles react to the change in training.  Cycling seems to me to soften and bulk up the muscles, running has a more hardening effect if that makes sense.  So while the Achilles is coping well the muscles are a bit tender, but that’s a welcome symptom.

To plan and monitor my training for the year ahead I use a program called SportTracks.  I discovered this pretty much by accident after having a play with a GPS tracker device.  The software allows for loading workouts in from all sorts of devices, I load heart rate data from a Polar HR monitor and using my IPhone and an app called MotionX GPS I can record the GPS data to track trails, distances and elevations.  It’s quite good fun but you have to be careful not to get too sucked in to analysing everything to death.  So here is a look at the data from the first post-Achilles run.

First the week summary

We will look at the run at 6:34pm on Sunday.  This was run from the Melbourne hotel where the chance of getting a decent GPS signal is poor, and with the run being 20 minutes at most I didn’t record GPS data.  Instead I mapped the route on MapMyRun.com  just to determine the distance and loaded that in manually.  This means that the GPS points for the route are not time stamped like they would be from a device which means you cannot see split data, but this was not relevant for this run anyway.

The summary view is the usual starting view. In this case the time, calories, and heart rate all came from the HRM, The distance was determined from the route I mapped on MapMyRun.

I’ll show the mapping another time.

There are a wide range of views available; here is the workout view which shows the heart rate data for the session.  You can see that probably the first 40 seconds constituted Zones 1, 2 & 3 but after that between 122 and 149 beats per minute.  Doesn’t really mean much for a workout  of this duration and intensity. 

I'll go into more detail on a more interesting workout soon.