Well after walking down-back with Bennie in a bit of a snow squall, I decided that running on the treadmill was going to be a better choice this morning.

Besides I was just a little interested in how my first run back to not paying attention to my heart-rate, was going to compare to where I was before I started the heart-rate training experiment.

To be honest I was interested to see if I had lost any endurance over the last three weeks, while doing heart-rate training.

I was planning on doing 45:00 minutes at about 7.0 mph (8.40 or so pace, which was a pace that I had run comfortably in early December) and seeing how I was feeling after a couple of miles. If everything felt good, at 4.0 miles I thought that I would finish up with 5x .1 strides.

The first two miles felt quite good, so I increased it to 7.1 and then at 3.0 miles I was still feeling strong so I pushed it up to 7.2 mph. When I got to 4.0 miles I was still feeling pretty good, so I decided to some .1 strides at a pretty fast (for me) pace and ended increasing the speed a bit the last two.

Needless to say I was running relaxed and not worrying about heart-rate or anything other than running relaxed and how I was feeling. I ran for 45:00 minutes while the treadmill and my Garmin were not really all that close I got in more than 5.0 miles so I was happy.

It was a very good run.

I can still see me using the heart-rate monitor for recovery runs where I want to ensure that I am running at the pace I want to run versus the pace that I typically run when I think that I am running a recovery run. Eventually I will get to the point where I will be able to run by feel and not rely on the heart-rate monitor as much.

Although I must say, it was nice to simply run without the distraction of attempting to run at a certain bpm.