Trying a new training regimen

I'm training for the local half marathon again. Like last year (before I was interrupted), I started using Runner's World's SmartCoach. Unlike last year, however, I wasn't really enjoying the plan. This is no fault of SmartCoach -- I still recommend that anybody looking for a plan should give it a look. The problem was the parameters that I plugged in were so terrible that it gave me a training schedule that just didn't fit what I was looking for.

The way it works is you put in a recent race time, your current weekly mileage, and how hard you'd like to train. I didn't really have any recent race times. I put in last year's half marathon, which I had run on three weeks of training after nearly a month off. Needless to say, it was slow, even for me. Also, my weekly mileage at that time was puny.

So SmartCoach had me running only three times a week for the first eight weeks, and four times for the remaining ten weeks. This was reasonable for a plodder with my recent training and speed.

I had two major problems with this schedule. First, I'm more enthusiastic about running now than I have been for a long time, and so I really wanted to run more than 24 times in eight weeks. The second thing is my assessment of what I need in order to improve on last year's fiasco in the half: I need to weigh less. Yes, I need the miles on the road, some speed work, all of that, but mostly I need to shrink my big belly. It's been my experience that the best way for me to do that, by far, is to exercise every day.

So after about five weeks of the SmartCoach schedule, I was really ready for a change.

Meanwhile, I started reading Kyle Kranz's blog. It's good. Read it. Coincidentally, he's the first guy I ever saw running in Vibram FiveFingers. It was in the Jack 15 a few years ago. I saw him just ahead of me early in the race, and I was so interested that I rushed up to him and pestered him with questions. Little did I know then that he didn't just run the 15 mile race that day; he ran several miles prior to make it a 26.2-mile day. These days he's running ultra-marathons.

Anyway, one of his posts mentions heart-rate-based training. Kyle doesn't really give much detail in that particular post, but the two pages he links go into the nitty-gritty. I don't remember exactly when, but some years ago I had read that second link. Along with a lot of training theory, it tells the story of a former runner who started up again, and the methods his friend & coach (the writer) suggested to him.

I won't go into much detail here, but it boils down to running exclusively at a low heart rate for several weeks before moving on to anything faster. The idea is to turn oneself into an efficient aerobic machine.

So about a week ago, I started running every day, at an easy pace. I have a Life Fitness T3-5 treadmill that is very good for this kind of thing. I tell it my target heart rate, initial speed, and how long I want to run, and it adjusts the incline and speed to keep my heart near that target.

Typically it gives me about three minutes before making any adjustments. Invariably, my heart rate at that point is well below the target, so it raises the incline. It gradually increases the incline until I've reached the target heart rate. From then on, it raises and lowers the incline as required. If I'm at zero incline, and my heart rate is too high, it will decrease the speed. It never increases the speed, even back to the starting speed -- once it's slowed down, it stays there or goes even slower if need be.

I picked an initial speed based on what SmartCoach had as my easy pace. So far, after a week, I haven't had to slow down to maintain my heart rate. I figured I'd give it a week at this pace, to see how I adjusted to running every day.

I ran just 30 minutes every day until today, when I ran 60 minutes. Still no slowdown at an hour, and indeed the treadmill even had me at a non-zero incline for most of the run. By the end I felt that in another 15 minutes or so I would have had to slow down a bit. I think this means I'm not too far under my best speed for this low heart rate.

So my plan is to slightly increase the speed starting tomorrow, and to stay at the same heart rate. Each time I can maintain the initial speed for the entire run three days in a row, I'll speed up 0.1 km/hr. I'll also run more than 30 minutes most days.

I'm very curious to see how this goes. I've always been a pretty slow runner, but this is slow even for me. If it works, I should be steadily speeding up. I'll try to post my findings in the coming weeks. I'll also say a bit about how I chose my target heart rate.