L11 Day 6 & 7 - Experimentation

When summer started getting bad, my performance seemed to go a bit down hill.  I started jogging very early in the morning.  My heart rate is higher for a given amount of work, I seem sluggish, and I've turned into a 'quitter' (don't tell nobody - but my eight mile runs seem to be history!).  So, over the past couple of days I've done some experimentation and I've looked to regain my mojo.

Monday Night's Jog

One thought was "Hey, I'm a night person".  I have no business getting up at 5 am every morning.  My body isn't awake yet, no wonder jogging got hard.  So, I went jogging on Monday night.  Rain had just cleared away, and it was relatively cool.  (72° and 90% humidity).  Well, let me tell you ... this run sucked.  Thus, I conclude that it is the humidity plus temperature that's thrown me into a tailspin.

Tuesday Night's Jog

When I got home from work, it started to rain HARD.  So, I sat at the table and ate dinner with the family like the typical non-super-hero runner dude.  Well, as soon as the chicken hit the bottom of my stomach, I'm starting to get that hankering for a jog.  But, now it's dark outside - what to do??

Yep, I resort to that zillion dollar treadmill in the basement.  And there were so many firsts associated with this workout:

1:  I used a fan.  I had it blowing hard up on my right side.  I could drift back a couple of feet on the belt for maximum cooling effect.  It was pretty sweet, and made me wonder why in the fudge I'd never taken advantage of it before.

2:  I drank some water during the jog.  I basically have to hold my breath for 10 seconds to get an airlock on the bottle and get a good swallow down.  And it probably takes me twenty-five seconds to recover from the trauma of trying to drink water on the jog.  But, I figure it's good practice if I ever decide to go for distance running.

3:  I never slowed the treadmill down.  I started at 5.1 mph and towards the end I went to 5.3, 5.5, and then 6.0.  (I did 6.0 mph for less than a minute.)  The entire exercise was done at an incline of 1%.

4: I used my Garmin in a non-GPS mode.  I told it I was indoors and wore the heart rate strap.  Like a dolt, I waited over a minute to turn the Garmin on.  I jogged 5K, but it took 36 minutes, not the 34:30 that the graph below shows.

It makes sense that my heart rate went up towards the end, because I punched in faster speeds.  But, I'm not sure why it drifted up between 10 and 27 minutes.  I was watching my Mamas and Papas DVD ... so it may have been Michelle Phillips.  I'm looking at footage of her from when I was a baby ... and I'm thinking about building a time machine.  In the words of the group's tenor, Denny Doherty, she was "the slurp of the century".  Now, I'm not going to interpret that statement.  But, nevertheless, I am going to agree with it wholeheartedly.

Conclusion

So, I've concluded that I'm not necessarily a night person.  I don't do too well in humidity.  And, the treadmill isn't really all too terribly bad.

And ...

I have now jogged five days in a row!!!  Yes, it's another first ... and best of all, I feel good.