Yet another good reason to run in the pitch dark
Monday. 4:45am. 4.5 miles into the run. Dark out.
Running along easily. No music, just thinking about my training. Suddenly I notice something odd. A few more steps, and I notice it again. No… yes. Hey! Is that…?
I stopped and threw up.
Out of nowhere I was sick on the side of the road. It just came upon me. Just running then… sick. While I was succumbing to being ill, I was thinking, “glad it’s dark out here”.
I walked it off and finished my run. 8.5 miles.
At first I blamed it on the Nantucket Blend I had before I left the house. But after the run, I was chilled and felt poorly. So I stayed home and slept all day. It was probably a bug, but just in case I had Breakfast Blend this morning.
Since my last post I’ve continued to run the plan. Except for Friday. Friday I slept through my alarm and had to shorten the run by three miles. Completed week 8 on Sunday with 51 miles.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is I think I need to slow down. Since getting my new HR monitor to obsess over, I’ve been trying to run within certain training zones. At first, I would keep staring at the watch. That got old. So I started to run by feel. But in doing so, my average HR has crept up and my pace has come down. Here is a little graph:
Over the past few days, my 7-day moving average has increased to the ceiling of where I want my 7-day moving average to be at this stage in my plan. I’ll try to run slowly tomorrow.
Downeast Running 
Lovely
Interesting. So 134 is something like a MAF heart-rate? Mine is about 130 and pace at that is about 5:30/k (8:50 miles). Want to get it down to 8 minute miles.
Currently, I am following Hadd a bit (see sidebar article). Slow days supposed to be around 130 and hard days near 140 – which isn’t hard at all. But I’m in the general prep phase that doesn’t end until March sometime. The goal of the general prep phase is to build up my mileage base without injury and/or peaking. I have found in the past that running too hard on the hard days and too early in the phases peaked me. Then I’d slide off and DNS my goal race. This time I am being very careful with my intensity.
Thanks. That makes sense. When I was following Hadd in ’07 I found the easy pace HR difficult to stick to — had to run very slowly, even walking on hills.