So this wasn't truly relaxed as I was pushing for a 5k nonstop and if I want to truly make this relaxed I will have to focus on never going very far into zone 4 of heart rate. I have lately been trying to focus on heart rate and keeping it down but I slipped up a bit with this run because I am a competitive person by nature and feel lazy when I am constantly walking. If I want to have a look at what that is like though, I am going to have to slow down because I cannot actually continue any speed of run while remaining in zone 3.
Burning 500 calories in an hour is kind of what I consider a BS workout, but there is a lot of information I have been reading lately about how the best endurance heartrate you can accomplish is zone 3, which for me is going to be below 150 BPM.
You can see here that I am entering the "orange" which is zone 4 heartrate way too often. I guess it is a combination of me growing as a cardio guy that leads to me so quickly getting an elevated heart rate. There are other people who would be going quite a bit faster than me that wouldn't be in this BPM zone but I guess that is what I am working on.
My pace at this heart rate is already pretty poor by my own standards but if I want this experiment to work out, I am going to need to go even slower.
This is frustrating to me because if I do a walk, I cannot get out of zone 2, if I jog, I bypass zone 3 and end up in 4. I refuse to "powerwalk" because I think you look like a tool when you do that.
So my only solution is going to have to be just running a bit, then walking until I get to zone 2, then run again, back and forth back and forth.
I am going to try to do that today but now we have another issue an that is that my relatively inexpensive bluetooth headphones are dying in one earbud and not the other. I get so frustrated with technology these days. This is like my 4th set of headphones in two years and I don't know what it is going to take to get something that is simply going to work.
My latest earbud fail was the Soundcloud Libery 5. They make all sorts of claims about battery life and sound and honestly, none of that has been true. They were fine for about 3 months but now it seems like almost any run I go on one side is crapping out before my 1 hour run is over. It's frustrating as heck, man!
I don't really need the mini-buds that everyone seems to love these days because I never wear them unless I am exercising. But I also do not want a cord connected to my phone in my pocket because that would be annoying as hell. I have already ordered some over-the-neck headphones where both sides are connected to the same centralized battery supply in order to avoid this.
I think that these "airpod copies" are made intentionally bad so that you have to constantly be buying new ones.
I'll report back on the zone 3 run and when the headphones get here, the way that they perform.