Not so long ago I took the advice of some studies and started to do zone 2/3 endurance runs where the only objective was for me to stay in a certain beats per minute (BPM) with my heart and not focus on my pace at all. It's all about going for longer than you normally would and just maintaining a pace that your body can endure long-term and therefore the exercise itself is benefiting you, but it also isn't really all that difficult.
In the past I had done 5k runs as fast as I could and was wearing myself out trying to out-do what I had done the week before. With these endurance runs, it isn't really up to me how fast I am going to be moving. It is up to the physical limitations of my heart and my cardiovascular system as a whole. At first I found it boring but it is far less taxing on my body than what I was doing before and just "legging it" as fast as I could for a 5k.
Now when I head out my objective is to run for an hour at a certain BPM and this particular time, which was yesterday, I was actually going a bit too fast and multiple times when I looked at my watch I needed to slow down.
The idea is to barely enter zone 4 or ideally, to never enter it.
the problem is that I am too heavy or my cardio network isn't in good enough shape yet for me to really be running at all in zone 3. I'm working on it!
I spent considerably more time in anaerobic zone 4 than I intended to, but for the most part I was barely in there. I think that when my heart rate got up to the 160's there were probably other people around or I was running faster in order to avoid a log-jam of the inconsiderate people that take up the entire trail with their group side by side.
I never felt winded during this run though and that is kind of the idea.
I did like that my pace was a good 40 seconds per km faster even though I was doing essentially the same thing as the last 1 hour BPM run that I did and this pleases me because it shows that my body is improving.
I'm at the point now that I stop in the end because of other sorts of fatigue such as pain in my joints. I am going to need to investigate methods of getting around this for the future. Perhaps I need better footwear. I bought some trail running shoes but because of their design I might be missing out on some cushioning that would make these runs easier if I had them.
Perhaps that will be what I look at next. At the end of one hour I feel like I could definitely do more but one of my knees and one of my ankles are kind of hurting at this point. I am not winded or gasping for breath and if I could do something about the joint pain, I feel as though there wouldn't really be anything stopping me from doing two hours.
For now I am going to stick to the one hour and see if I can get my body to just become faster naturally over time...which is kind of the entire point.
