Running Notes by HJL

Today I ran a set of hill intervals on the treadmill. I like running intervals on the treadmill since everything is completely repeatable and doesn’t depend on my ability to manage pace and effort. The data from the heart rate monitor is also relatively interesting to look at afterwards.

This is the first set of intervals I’ve run on this training cycle. I find it psychologically helpful to complete at least 2 miles of 5% incline (today I did 3 miles) on a hill day, as this roughly corresponds to the ascent at Hurricane Point, the longest hill on the Big Sur Marathon course.

I normally run my intervals for 5 minute duration, rather than by distance. For hill interval days, I pick an “easy” pace and only change the incline between 0% and something between 5% and 8%. Whether it’s hill intervals or pace intervals, I normally try to keep a fixed level of effort for each rep. A 5% incline seemed to work out ok today. Unfortunately, at the moment, my “easy” pace is around 10:00 instead of 9:00 or 8:30. Today that put my HR at around 135-140, while the last couple of hill intervals ended up close to 170.

I’m still baffled by my elevated HR compared with log data from past years, but at least I’m continuing to make progress on this training cycle.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 3:35 pm and is filed under running, training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.