Running Notes by HJL

Here’s a comparison of today’s 60 minute treadmill run with an identical workout a year ago.

I haven’t been having very good workouts for quite a while, mostly going back to a round of something like bronchitis back in October. It was sort of like the flu, then got better, but never completely cleared out. I’m fine sitting around in the office, but in general I haven’t been breathing right for a while. My resting heart rate is 10-15 points high, and I feel like I’m running uphill or at altitude all the time.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any “acute” medical symptoms either. I finally made an appointment to see a doctor last week, explaining it to the appointment desk as a followup to the bronchitis back in October. He seemed a bit puzzled about why I was there at first, since I look perfectly healthy and my vital signs look pretty typical. The health care system isn’t really set up for “consultative” visits, but one piece of data that turned up was that my peak flow rate for breathing is down about 25% compared with a visit a couple of years ago. (I had come in with a lingering cough and chest congestion after a trip to Beijing, which has notoriously bad air, so I wasn’t breathing very well then either.)

Apparently, my current peak flow rate is reduced even further than that, which partially explains why I’m fine sitting around at the desk and why my normal easy aerobic paces are driving my heart rate up into LT-training range.

I’m doing various tests to get a better handle on how to address this. They mentioned that I could try an asthma inhaler, but I wanted to understand what’s going on before throwing medication at it, since I haven’t had any problems before other than seasonal allergies. In the meantime, I’m sort of an odd bird in the pulmonary lab, since although I feel crummy, my blood O2 is fine, my peak flow rate is still within “normal” ranges, and my spirometer test (lung capacity) is apparently still well above “normal”.

I’m going ahead with training for Big Sur, based on the fact that nothing major seems to be wrong, and the doctor seems confident that at worst we could treat it with an inhaler. In the meantime, I think I’m going to treat this a little like training at altitude, and dial down the paces and intensity so I don’t spend all my training time in high aerobic or LT ranges.

I just signed up for the Big Sur Marathon again this evening.

This will be my 3rd time around. Here are my notes after last year’s run, which I finished in about 3:50.

One of the things I like about running marathons is there isn’t really any way to shortcut the preparation. In general you can’t just be athletically gifted and run a marathon course. At Big Sur this is even more true, due to the famously hilly course.

I’m splitting off the running related posts from the main blog. I’d like to post a bit more frequently, and am hesitant to inflict a lot of day to day running minutiae on the non-runners.

I’m not sure if I’m going to move the previous posts over to here. At the moment, you can see last year’s running posts here.