M'kay

Great pace Dale! I hope your calfs feel better tomorrow. What in the world is that photo of?

Thanks, it's feeling better this morning.

The picture is of the baton we got for running the Northwest Passage relay, sitting on a shelf in my desk at the home office.

Dale great miles and pace this week. I envy your ability to crank out all these sub 7:30 miles with such ease.

Also interesting to look at your HR info each day since I've started tracking this.

One thing I'm noticing is that on my early morning runs when I wake up and immediately go running, my HR is often similar to my afternoon runs even though I'm running 1 minute per mile slower in the morning. Have you noticed anything like this?

Also curious what you think your max HR is? What's the best way to figure it out and is it possible to actual get there in a race? I've seen my HR hit 190 a couple of times some I'm thinking my max is probably around 195, but just wondering what the best way is to measure it. 195 seems abnormally high for a person my age (almost 44) but I suppose a lot of this stuff is just hereditary and nothing to worry about.

BTW I think you will totally crush your marathon with a massive PR.

Thanks Tom. Not sure how but I seem to have had some switch flipped a couple of weeks ago and have felt pretty good lately. Wish I knew how it happened...

I'm not very good at running first thing upon waking....I'm noticeably stiffer and slower compared to when I run after I've been up for a few hours. I don't think my HR is much higher, just that it's tougher to get up-to-speed for the first couple (several) miles. But it does sound like we're alike in one regard.....neither of us are particularly good at running without letting our bodies wake up.

My max is 193. I did the initial measurement by strapping the HR monitor on a couple of years ago, warming up for a few miles, and doing repeats on the steepest hill I could find until I was exhausted, then looked for the max when I downloaded the garmin data. At that time, it was 189. Just this past August in a 5K, I peaked at 193, so I guess I'd just been sandbagging it all along! :) Seriously, I'm not sure how I managed to hit my max in the middle of a 5K but I do know I was hurting badly by that point.

I'm not sure there's really any "normal" HR.....there's the mean for people of a certain age but I recall the over/under is like 20 bpm, so it's a pretty wide range to fall into. Plus, I believe the max doesn't fall nearly as linearly as they say with age for folks who exercise, so the 190s are definitely completely plausable.

I've also got a heart murmur (have since birth, barely detectable) and an abnormal EKG, so I often wonder how/how much those affect my HRs during exercise. I know that over time my exercise HRs at certain paces (threshold, marathon, etc.) have made more sense (i.e. fallen into more commonly accepted %max ranges), but my easy pace HR is still pretty high (140-160). I asked my coach once and he said not to worry....some folks can use the HR as a pacing guide, others can't. Plus, mine is definitely affected by temps, humidity, tiredness, exposure to direct sun, and probably some other factors I've forgotten. I guess it's one tool in the toolbox.

We'll see about the PR.....I'm going to pray for good weather, run the first 20 miles for a 3 hr pace, and run the rest with whatever is left. The good news is that I'll have company with a fellow blogger trying to sneak below the 3 hour mark as well.