i was literally about to reply to the opposite effect in your journal, haha. pace is so affected by outside stuff: temperature, humidity, elevation gain, whether you're alone or with others, etc. one day's 5:15 is another day's 5:45; threshold pace on a chilly day or on the track is lower than a hot day or on a hilly route. your body's systems work together to produce pace, and i'm more and more convinced that it's a bad proxy for training load, for that reason. HR isn't ideal, either, but at least it's a measure of something important going on inside your body, rather than an output. speed/interval work could be an exception, but otherwise i'm gonna be focusing on HR.
I think a bunch of those things impact HR as well (question of priority, right, are we asking "what's my HR at this pace?" or "what's my pace at this HR?"). I think for me I'd rather pair pace (or grade/effort-adjusted pace depending on how reliable your watch is at producing that) + RPE, with HR as a secondary guide. I still like HR for easy efforts, but that's b/c it's a reliable way to make sure my easy efforts are very easy, and doing 3xsub-threshold workouts a week, they have to be or I'd be toast.
One big reason I like pace is sort of indirect. Cyclists have way more useful data available to them, and basically all of them train by power with much less priority given to HR. Now ofc power is way more reliable and objective than anything a runner can get, but (grade-adjusted) pace is closest.
Other less general factors: (1) The relative temperateness of my climate compared to yours also makes it easier for me to have this view (though iirc, Magness has made some comments about giving lower priority to HR in Houston since the summer makes it do crazy things) (2) The timing of my medication vs when I run makes a big difference, and I know that's got zilch to do with internal load.
takeaways:
- my easy/hard split is smack on 80/20, which is good. but the easy mileage might even be a little too easy. i think it's worth starting to allow my HR to creep up just a bit on long runs, while leaving recovery runs (i.e., tuesday and thursday and sometimes saturday) very chill. anything up to 149 is in what coros describes as "aerobic endurance" zone. i probably won't push *that* hard, but more try letting HR hover around 140 instead of around 130, as i've been doing.
- unrelated but, i need to really start forcing more consistency with strength training. i might bail on the gym membership, i'm not climbing enough to make progress anyway, and use the money saved to pick up a couple of DBs. once my wife and i move again, i'll put up the fingerboard she got me and use that for pull ups. hasn't seemed worth it in this house because we want to leave before it gets cold again.
As I said above, if you're starting to push more workouts+overall, I'd be careful about pushing up easy efforts. I'm extremely pro just buying some dumbbells + getting a pullup setup and doing home workouts, though. This is one place where I think using intervals.icu is useful, since you can see what's actually moving the needle in terms of load/fitness.
- last but not least, i feel really good: excited about running, itching to sign up for some more races and see how fast i can get.
awesome! feeling's mutual.
Recent Posts
