Week 16, 2012

After-marathon recovery

Usually after a marathon think about everything but running and would take at least one week off. Not this time. I decided to do a short jog immediately on Monday, hopefully to help with recovery. It took quite a lot of strong will to do that, but actually once I started moving it didn't hurt that much. On Wednesday I joined the regular Sportsworld training and the pain was fairly manageable by then. Gym training on Thursday and another Sportsworld run on Friday. This time it was only Jan and me, and, as expected, Jan had no mercy :). Unfortunately my speed sensor broke down during this run but according to my GPS for the best part of the 16K that we did, we were going faster than 5:00min/km -- tough speed if you just run a marathon and indeed my HR confirms that. Then I was planning to already do some long runs over the weekend, but somehow my personal plans interfered with that -- maybe that's for the better, as I guess I did deserve some break.

Few minor changes to the interface. I finally got rid of the annoying "incompatible browser" message (though still didn't get round to fix things for Firefox). I also introduced 3-split over every zone, although if you look at the data it's not very visible. It's essentially invisible for individual trainings and for weekly summary you can see it, but I'm not sure whether it improves things. Maybe later I'll experiment a bit more with it, because it may just be an interface issue, but it's also quite likely that I'll just chalk it up as a failed experiment. And I have more important things to work on.

Another thing is the zones that I predefined. Michal was suggesting some improvements. I agree they are quite impromptu are by no means not perfect but I don't think I'll follow his suggestion to split the hardest zone (<4:14 min/km). For me running above that speed is a heavy speed workout. Of course whether it's 4:10min/km or 3:50min/km makes a huge difference but I don't think this is something that should be reflected in the zones. My idea is that the zones should give a rough estimation of the type of effort and should basically correspond to the notions of: walking, jogging, recovery pace, easy pace, steady pace, speed/tempo runs. So I don't think I'll be trying to move the scale towards faster pace. On the other hand trying to somehow tie the zones with McMillan's values sounds like a good idea and I hope to give it a try. Another great thing would be to somehow tie together HR and pace zones, but I'm not sure yet how to do that properly. Hope time will come for that but for now I'd like to stop working on the weekly view and move on to a detailed-workout view. Plenty of cool stuff to be done there ;).

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