A.M. Tempo run with Jeff. Wore racing flats. The warm-up was sluggish as usual - felt reluctant to run 8:00 although we eventually got up to that pace. The foot fussed a bit, I considered not running the tempo for a moment. But then figured the minus of losing the fitness was greater than the plus of giving the foot additional rest. It was not any worse off than it was at the start of the 15 mile tempo on Saturday, and I was able to get to the end of a hilly course 15 in 1:29 at 5:56 average. So I figured if I was OK after a hard 15 at the end of 20 it would be OK for 5 at the same pace in the middle of 10. The plan was to maintain my HR as close to 152 as possible and see what pace that would produce. Jeff predicted that we will be a little bit under 29:00. He ended up being dead right. Our final time was 28:54.1. I made sure to wet the contacts of the HRM to avoid malfunction. An error as little as 5 bpm would render the device useless. In fact any error would render it useless. Fortunately, HRMs tend to err either a lot or not at all. The first mile was sluggish. We opened with a quarter in a glorious 94. Then sped up to a normal pace - 87, then fell asleep (90), and kept on sleeping until the 1400 meter mark, and then all of a sudden woke up and sped up to 5:20. Needless to say with this kind of pacing, and with it being the first mile I completely ignored the HR for the purpose of deciding if the pace was too fast or too slow. HR was slowly climbing, but was still below 145 until the surge. First mile was 5:58. I figured I would not be maintaining 5:20 or even 5:30 at the HR of 152, but decided to just keep going for a bit without fuss to let the HR climb to the target. After a quarter in 83 HR was 154, so I alerted Jeff accordingly. Interestingly enough I was able to run 84-85 quarters to the end of the second mile without sending more alerts. Our second mile was 5:38. Even though my HRM has the alert option, we still use verbal alerts. It would be very annoying if the HRM started to malfunction half way through. Or perhaps if it got a little warmer and the HR range would need to be adjusted. Or if for some reason we decided half way through that the target HR was wrong. It would be nice if the HRMs had a lock/unlock low HR button and lock/unlock high HR button for alerts. You look at it, see a certain HR, decide you do not want to be below or above it, and lock it with one button press! Then the HRM bugs out or it gets hot, or you decide you want to work a bit harder, and you do not want to be beeped at, so you unlock it. With no dumb "Are you sure?" confirmation screens! Some of those gadgets, like Garmin 305, have a delusion of grandeur. They think the information they are collecting is so important that we can absolutely not train without it. So when losing a signal, for example, it of course needs to flash a huge error message screen that covers everything else until you confirm that you've noticed it! Things settled down by the third mile. I used the following alert rule. 151 - pull alongside Jeff and push the pace a bit. This did not happen often. 153 - no fuss. 154 - see if it is going to drop to 153 or rise to 155. If stable for too long, verbal alert. 155 - immediate verbal alert. This is one reason I would like to have an HRM with an open development platform. With a development kit I could program it to do the lock/unlock magic as well as the fuzzy alerts myself. With that our third mile was 5:44, and the fourth 5:45. At the end of the fourth mile the HRM did a trick. I noticed that HR fairly quickly climbed from 152 to 157 with no increase in perceived effort or pace. Then it quickly dropped to 152. I did not issue alerts figuring either the HRM was probably malfunctioning for a second, or possibly we hit a packet of warm air, or something weird like that. No alerts on the uphill quarter even though HR hit 155. But once we were done and Jeff tried to maintain the effort and I saw HR staying at 155 I gave an alert. So the rest of the last mile was at 152, and the time was 5:49. The right foot fussed during the tempo and I could tell it was interfering with the economy. It was difficult to relax, although not unbearably difficult. I'll do most of my miles before TOU on grass with hopes of a more complete healing. But I am not getting my hopes too high. I feel confident that in good conditions I can get to 15 in 1:25 or faster, but what is going to happen after that I have no clue. Cooled down to 10, then took Benjamin, Jenny, and Julia to Grandview. Jenny and Benjamin ran ahead, I stayed with Julia. She took me to 1.53 in 14:14, then I picked it up and chased down the older kids. Passed Jenny, went after Benjamin. The chase lap was 2:18 (5:57 pace), but I caught Benjamin a little bit before the end, so the actual fast pace was a bit faster. They know better than to try to run away from Dad when they are in trouble! Finished 2 with Benjamin in 17:14. Jenny finished 2 in 17:41.
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