Finally, I got a run in. After three days of no running, three whole days!

Saturday was a scheduled day of rest, but I felt like crap and probably would not have run. Sunday was more of the same feeling like crap and I ended up taking another rest day – could I have run…probably but I have run a lot this year and the last couple weeks of a year are for recuperating and getting ready for a new year’s set of goals.

Monday I was still feeling pretty nasty, but it was snowing the the roads were nasty, so with all the snowblowing and stuff I decided to take one more day off from running. Probably a good choice, I was quite tired by the end of the day and if I had run, it would have been too much.

Which gets me to this morning…I wasn’t 100%, but felt good enough to Go For A Run after walking Bennie down-back for his long walk. Also I wanted to get to trying running by heart-rate. I not going to do MAF training at this point, but after talking with some people I trust and bouncing some ideas around, I decided to start by attempting keep my heart-rate under 135 bpm.

I have a chest strap heart-rate monitor that syncs to the treadmill, that I believe is a bit more accurate than my GPS watch’s based on things I have read, so I put that on. It is easier to see the heart-rate on the treadmill’s control panel.

I started the treadmill at 6.5 mph and kept reducing the speed, whenever my heart-rate hit 138 bpm. By the time I got to 3.0 miles I was down to 5.9 mph to maintain the 135 bpm goal.

Yeah, it was hard for me to run this slow on the treadmill, but it is something that I feel I have to do over the next few months to see if I can get a good base.

The big negative is that it takes so damn much longer to run a distance.

However, once I got done, I felt as though I still needed to run and that I needed to stretch the legs out a bit. So I did a set of 5 x .1 fast strides with .1 rests between. The speedy stuff felt good and the rests were faster than my fastest speed on the 3.0 mile heart-rate managed run.

Needless to say my average bpm for those strides was much higher than 135 bpm. 😉

One thing that I did learn today, that the first 3:00 minutes or so on the treadmill are garbage when it comes to my heart rate. My watch is all over the place to begin and then settles in and was very close to the heart rate chest strap readings that I was getting on the treadmill’s console.

While my primary workout might be slower, I still plan to run strides 2-3 times a week after to keep me sane. Hehehehe