What A Difference A Week Makes!

Last week, I entitled my long run post 13 miles the hard way.

This week I should name my long "13 miles the dumb way".

First of all, I was happy that I was able to get in my Sunday long run. We went to the North Georgia Mountains to pick up my 10 year old son from camp, and so I could not run in the morning. The temperature was hot so I estimated that a 3 hour run that started at 5 PM would start out hot but be cool towards the end.

I used a new circular route that I had never run before. I used mapmyrun.com to calculate how long it would be and got it to be about 12.5 to 13 miles.

Wow, was it hot. And of course, keeping my heart rate down was a challenge. I found that my heart was up above my MAF rate of 135 even when I was walking up hill. So (of course) I decided to abandon my MAF heart rate at an early stage in my run. My plan was to run at a "comfortable" pace without regard to my heartrate.

As you can see from the attached chart, my heart rate immediately jumped into the 150s although I did not feel fatigued at all.

However, the impact of the heat and the early increase in my heart rate became readily apparent at miles 10-13 when my legs felt like lead and any thoughts of picking up the pace were clearly pipe dreams.

Chalk that up as another learning experience.