Well, I finished the first week of this training plan and I think I like it a lot.  So far, things are going pretty smooth.  I logged 23.5 miles in the first week, 29.81 miles overall (today starts week two).  This first week, I averaged about 9:30 per mile and 159 bpm while running.

Yesterday was scheduled to be a 1 hour easy run.  I went ahead for 1 hour 34 minutes instead.  I learned first hand the reasoning behind one of running and racing’s biggest rules of thumb yesterday.  What rule is that?  It’s spoken one of two ways, either “Go out slow,” or “Don’t start fast.”  I decided to start my run yesterday by wearing out running with Ruby, our dog.  She’s never really run more than a mile, but does pretty good at it the few times we’ve gone.  After a mile, she never really seems tired.  I thought that 1.5 miles might make a better run for her.  My main mistake when running with Ruby is letting her set the pace.  The first mile we averaged 9:07, which isn’t really a big deal, but there was no consistency.  One minute we’d be running a really quick 6:30, the next stopping to smell something interesting.   This constant sprinting at the beginning of a long run had my heart rate up in Zone 4 around 172 bpm fairly quickly.  It kept me elevated higher than I wanted to be (I am going to stick to the plan!) for quite a while and I found I had to run very slow to keep my heart rate in Zone 3 like the plan wanted.  Even 6 miles down the road, I could feel the initial burst of speed affecting me.  It didn’t make me tired, I had no problem with the distance or pace at all, except that the pace was slow.  To maintain a Zone 3 heart rate, instead of running around a 9 minute pace like I have all week, I had to keep my pace slower than 10 minutes and even closer to 11.

This surprised me.  I had always heard the old rule, but this showed me, with my own heart rate, the reason behind it.  Your heart’s a muscle just like your legs.  If you wear it out at the beginning with sprints, the rest of your run will suffer.  Now, I wasn’t particularly tired, but I’m not really sure I could have kept a 9:00 minute pace even if I’d allowed myself to run in HR Zone 5.

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Today was scheduled to be a half hour easy run, but I went for an hour.  The weather is so nice today, that I couldn’t resist.  No big lessons learned here, just a nice fun run.

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Today was my third training day on Active.com’s Advanced 1/2 Marathon Program. Thanks to a sale Active was having at the end of July, I paid the princely sum of $0.00 for this plan that now sells for $30!  One thing I really like about this plan is that Active sends me daily email reminders letting me know exactly what I’ll be doing when I hit the road.  I also like that it was free!

Today’s prescribed run was an easy 45 minute hilly run.  Now, as most people who live in Brandermill will know, it’s actually kind of hard to find a route that’s not hilly anywhere near me.  With that in mind, I tried to find the most consistently up-and-down areas to run.  One thing I noticed during marathon training is that every road near me seems to be downhill when heading west and uphill when heading east.  So, that makes finding consistent hills pretty easy, just run up and down the streets.

The weather this morning was just about perfect, mid-60′s and sunny.  I really kind of wish I had carried my camera with me.  Around the middle of mile 4 I came across an open field surrounded by trees with about a foot of light fog sitting on it and the moon (just a couple days past full) hovering just above the trees in a fairly bright sky.

I felt really good about this run and was quite surprised that I came in at 5 miles for the 45 minutes of running.  It felt much faster than 9:00 minute miles , but I guess the hills got me.  I definitely didn’t stay within the target heart rate zone, most of the time I was just inside zone 4.

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My next run is scheduled for Saturday and should be a 1 hour easy run.  I think I’m going to actually run longer than that.  I had longer base miles before our vacation, and I think I’ve still got some of that base in my legs and lungs.  So, I’ll probably run about 1:30 instead of one hour.