New Course

I need to figure out how to upload maps from my Garmin.

This morning I ran on the campus of Darlington School with AP and Wilson. Both of those guys are much faster than me, so I need to run with them AMAP. Darlington sits on 400 acres of mostly wooded areas. AP, the head XC coach at the school, took us on a 5 mile course that had everything - wooded trail, grass, the school's XC course, paved road, hills, even a tunnel. It was a great course that reminded me of the value of hill training. My ankle was tender this morning, but a mile into the run, even with the unstable terrain of trails, I was running pain-free. Hopefully I can now put that behind me.

Another topic I need to cover is heartrate training - one of the top reasons I got into running and keep running was and is to stay heart healthy. Heart disease runs in my family. To this end, I wear a heart rate monitor when I run (almost like a bra - very manly). I have a suspicion that my average heart rate is too high on easy runs - this morning my average rate was 167. I will probably get into this in future posts.

Finally, AP mentioned a chart that compares race times in various distances that has been developed by our friend Jay. The purpose of the chart is to show how a time at one distance compares to a time at another, for what we can call "reasonable projection" purposes. For instance, AP's recent performance at the Peachtree Road Race (38:59) translates into a 3:02 marathon. While this is not an exact science, it can be very helpful. I will be interested to see what my race times need to be to project a BQ marathon time.