Relief! I have a cold

Technology can be a double edged sword. Outdoors I run with a Polar S610 heart rate monitor on one arm, and a Garmin Forerunner 201 on the other. You can see what can be done with the S610 in my previous "Progress" post: I have all my runs' and gym sessions' heart rates (HRs) recorded in detail on my PC. The Forerunner too is a fantastic piece of kit: it tells you how fast you are running, how far you have gone, it will pace you with a 'Virtual Running Partner' and it will even show you the way back home, something which came in very handy a few nights ago when I was left to find my own way back to the Leisure Centre from a new training venue.

So on the one hand you have the positive reinforcement that training is going well, when you can view HR plots such as my previous post, but you equally know instantly when things are not going quite as well as you hoped.

Yesterday I ran the Gosport Half Marathon as a training run. I have the Hayling 10 mile race next week, which I am planning to race flat out, so I needed to ensure I kept Gosport nice and relaxed so that I'm in good shape for next week. I knew the target pace needed to keep my heart rate down, and set the Garmin Forerunner to pace me at a nice relaxed constant pace. I was only a mile into the race when I realised that things weren't quite right. Sure, my heart rate was low, but after recent training runs I was expecting it at least 5, maybe 10, bpm lower.

Was it race day nerves? I'd experienced that before, but I wasn't racing and felt relaxed! Maybe I was too warm? It was a much warmer day than expected after Saturday's arctic blast, and I had to strip off a layer after a few miles. Unlikely though!

Maybe it was the chatting? I can imagine the men out there nodding in disapproval, but many of you have yet to realise the true benefits of chin wagging during a race. Just as pumping your arms is meant to give benefits when pushing up a hill, wagging of the chin has positive benefits on endurance at the rear of a race field. It's true!

My friend decided that maybe the chat was pushing up my heart rate, but I wasn't convinced. Maybe she was too polite to just say "Shut up!"

I managed to do the race at an average of 127bpm which is 73% of my maximum, so a good base training run was achieved. It was still bothering me though that it should have been not much more than 120bpm. Next week in my full on race this could amount to as much as 20 seconds per mile - over 3 minutes difference!


This morning I awoke with the sniffles and a slight sore throat! Hooray! That is why my HR was high on Sunday. I've never been so pleased to catch a cold!

I just hope I'm over it by next Sunday!