Friday, July 9, 2010

Busy busy busy…even in my sleep!

It’s been one of those weeks, on the back foot all the time, trying to catch up and always one step behind. Lack of blog writing, lack of blog reading, my reader is at 300 and counting! Three working lunches in four days put the kibosh on hitting the gym and I have been up at dark o’clock getting the miles in even before my wife leaves the house for her 6:00am Boot Camp class!

It’s mostly good and I am more or less hitting my training goals, well with the exception of yesterday, unscheduled rest, I am on schedule. I need more weights work. The mileage is increasing slowly and I’ll break through into the 30’s permanently in the next week and be staying there moving forward!

The Heart Rate zone work is really dialing in and now I have shored up the lower limit I am seeing the improvement in my pace, what were 9:00 min miles and now 20 seconds or so faster! But I am sticking to Zone 2 for the immediate future and putting the miles in the bank.

I am seeing a lot of folks switch over to the Garmin 110 and 310XT recently and since I adopted my wife’s 305 last year, it was too big and complicated for her, my need to change has fallen way down the list, in fact I am still using my original 305 from 2007 which is going strong. Actually having two will be great when I hit those longer longer runs that are in the future. The only downside has been I am using up the battery life in the HR straps, the second one died this week and so I switched out the battery from a small torch and it still wouldn’t start! Crap I thought I’ll need to get a new one, a somewhat unnecessary $70! But no, a new battery ($3.29 from Target) did the trick! And so while changing the battery and charging a watch I decided to run a sleep baseline on my Heart Rate, I did this 2-3 years ago and have long since lost the data, but thought this would give me another baseline for this training cycle. So I shut off all the Alerts and Auto Pause on my 305, left it on the nightstand and voila!

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Can you tell how fast I fall asleep! What I think is fascinating, are the peaks and troughs, a low of 34 seems very low and a high of 76 a bit high, who knows what causes them, interestingly I used to suffer from sleep apnea, I had some surgeries (this one and this one, oh yeah fun times!) and now it’s a lot better but clearly there are somethings happening to cause the spikes! Of course if you were to believe the GPS tracking I am simply running around the house and garden like my hair is on fire!

As always I am an experiment of one!

Have a great weekend!