52 Lives

The first round of 52Lives started as planned. I woke up 5:08, put my running gear on and got out. I usually go running straight from the bed, so I don’t have time to think about excuses why not to go This Monday morning there was no reason to think about excuses, though. I didn’t feel tired, the weather was absolutely beautiful and it was the first day of my life (Life1)

The training plan was about fast paeed run, a.k.a. tempo run. This means I warm up for 10 min, then run above my average running speed for 20 min and then cool down for 10 min,

In this exercise a heart rate (HR) monitor is a valuable tool. I got my trusty Polar S410 with me, configured to support the training.

• Warm up settings. For the the warm up I set HR limits, so that I wouldn’t start too hard. When running my normal speed, I try to keep my HR at 120-130 beats per minute. So for the warm up I used limits 100 - 120. There’s also another cool feature in S410. I can set 3 different HR limits with different time settings. This means that I can for example set the warm up HR limits and then set time for the warm up session to 10 minutes. This is very handy!
• Tempo run settings. I set the HR limits without thinking too much: lower limit 110 and upper limit 160. I thought there’s no need to worry about the lower limit, since I’m going to be running fast, so I left the default setting there. But I could have thought the upper limit once more. I have read from the wikiHow that 10% increase to your normal running speed is enough for the tempo run, Now I like to think in the terms of HR, not speed since I don’t have the equipment to measure my speed while I’m running. Also the HR is a very good measurement point, because it tells a lot about how our body is reacting to the training. Having said this, I should’ve used upper HR limit of 143 (130 * 1,10 = 143). The time setting for the tempo run was 20 minutes. When the wam up time ends, the HR monitor notifies the user with a beep (even with sounds disabled) and it continues with the next time setting, in this case the 20 minutes for tempo run.
• Cool down settings. These were similar with the warm up settings. During the cool down, the HR monitor showed again why it’s useful to measure your HR, not only time. After the tempo run I slowed my running speed to the warm up level. In 1 minute I noticed that my HR is above the cool down levels, meaning that I’m running too fast. I switched to walking and saw how my HR went down to acceptable levels. This important for the cool down session. There’s no cooling down if our body is still doing hard work, I walked for about 5 minutes and then tried running slowly. What happened? The HR went up again So I walked for the rest of the way.
• Statistics. The S410 save some of the statistics to its memory. I usually see two values after my training: average heart rate and burned calories. For the tempo run the overall HR was 134 and I burned 415 kcals (about 2 Snickers chocolate bars ).

Photo of the day

Whenever I’m able to take my Nokia E65 phone to my runs, I try to take a photo of something that is worthwhile to remember from that training session. Often I find myself taking pictures of beautiful morning scenery, those really make my day Here’s a picture I took on Monday.

Beautiful sky in Ylojarvi. I was running in our neighborhood and was lucky to catch this view. This is one the reasons to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning

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