Friday, March 4, 2011

Experiment #3 on speed and walk running

For the 3rd week in a row I am running the same 10 miles with the last 5 hard.
Strategy for the last 5 miles
Week 1 – 1:00 walk / mile
Week 2 – 0:30 walk / mile
Week 3 – no walking
Looking back on all of this the “no walk” should have been week 1.

Another goal for this run was to match last week’s times then we could analyze the differences in HR. This is really hard to do for a few reasons
1. My memory at 5:30 AM ain’t to sharp. The best I could remember is 740 730 710 710 700
2. Stoplights, I may have caught it last time but this time I had to wait.
3. I couldn’t match the first 5 from last week because I think I was still asleep until mile 3.
Here’s the data



I don’t know how I managed to come within 0:03 of last week’s total 5 mile time. If I wouldn’t have gone berserk the last mile I would have been spot on.

Straight through running without walk breaks was more efficient. Not only that but this was mentally easier than last week’s run. Last week’s run felt like an interval workout (it kind of was). So it looks like if I want to run a faster I’ll have to stop walking.

GPS Data technical talk
If last week’s splits look a little different it’s because they are. I had to use some math to try and predict the splits since the watch only came back with 9.91 miles. This time the route was 9.95 but I still needed to fix the splits otherwise that last mile is way off. The math I used last week was faulty, so I fix it and created a spreadsheet that better estimates where the splits are when my Garmin comes up short (or long). The change is +/- 0:00 - 0:03 per mile and then the last mile split may have big changes.