Your heart keeps you honest

I have recently started heart rate training and that has made me very curious about the subject. As mentioned in my latest scribble, constantly running your easy runs too hard can be detrimental to the physiological responses you are looking for.

Currently, my anaerobic tolerance is good; I can keep on running at a higher threshold for a long period of time. However, I am not achieving maximum productivity aerobically, meaning that whilst I can sustain said high workload, it is at a higher effort than it could and should be.

I am aware that not all trail runners share the same enthusiasm about heart rate training as I do, and whilst I believe there of course are both pros and cons for this methodology, I think there is a lot we can learn from it if we have the patience to follow it through. Not just about our training and overall efficiency, but about ourselves, as people navigating the world.

With a current average of over 350 kilometres covered each month and a 50-mile race coming up shortly, I want to make sure I make the most of my recovery, as this is when my body repairs itself and I grow as a runner.

So, to help speed this up, not only do I eat well, but I also drink a lot of water and prioritise my sleep, and for the sake of this scribble, keep my heart rate in the lower ranges during the majority of my 5 weekly training runs.

A niggle turned out to be a blessing in disguise

A couple of months ago, halfway through my self-prescribed race training plan, my right quad became annoyingly sore during one of my weekly long runs. It was not an injury, but it did not feel like regular soreness from physical exhaustion either.

Stubborn as I am, I kept on running and funnily enough the pain did not go away, it only got worse. I spent some time stretching the legs after a shower and that made it subside a little, but it was not fully gone. It was Saturday, so the next day would mean yet another long run. Back-to-back long runs are normal weekend activities when you are training for an ultra marathon.

Towards the end of my run on the Sunday, my right quad was sore in the same spot again. I spent the Monday resting up and managed to locate the soreness as coming from either the vastus lateralis or the tensor fascia latae. Stretching was just not doing the trick, so I took Tuesday and Wednesday off running and reached out to a coach who had a great reputation within the running community, and luckily he had time to take me on — so I hired him!

Long story short, I have been neglecting my strength & conditioning and mobility sessions for the majority of the last year, albeit having worked from home and had the time I would normally spend on commuting to hand. How and why on earth I had been doing that for so long is still a mystery to both of us. He accessed me on the same day, we ran (not literally) through my race and life plans for 2021, and a couple of days later we started our journey...

Heart rate training 101

One of the first things my new coach did, was to introduce me to heart rate training. Having never paid too much attention to my heart rate, I was shocked when I started stalking my past runs — I bet he was too; my average HR was very high! Previously, the majority of my runs had unconsciously been executed with an anaerobic dominant output. I only ran to see gains in speed or distance. Frankly, I did not know better.

My Sunday recovery runs had been prescribed in time rather than distance and with my stubborn and competitive mindset, I saw that as an easy way of increasing my weekly mileage. I just needed to speed up, as the faster I ran, the more miles I could cover in said time. Oh, how wrong I was!

Heart rate integrates a lot of complex variables to tell a story about how hard your body is working and whilst there is a lot of variance depending on external factors, understanding how your unique cardiac physiology responds to your training can let you calibrate your perceived exertion with greater ease and assurance.

I will never forget my initial run in an assigned heart rate zone. I was told not to go above a certain number of beats per minute, and ease into the run slowly. Absolutely, I thought to myself, how hard could that be? I warmed up, laced up my shoes and hit the trails.

I ran at what I perceived to be an easy pace, but my heart rate was much higher than it was supposed to be. I tried to slow down; my heart rate was still too high. I slowed my pace even more and was still 10s of beats above what my coach wanted me to stay below.

In my mind, my impatient thoughts went ’’No way... you are running at a snail’s pace! How are you going to get any better by doing this? All the training you have done in the past few months will be wasted!’’ — I was shocked to be running almost 8-minute kilometres in order to keep my heart rate low enough. It required some walking to stay within the range.

After the session, I checked in with my coach through a relatively dramatic and long message about my worries about regressing and his response was: "Maria... for this to work long term, you will have to trust the process and practise this with patience." So, I did.

Patience is key

The following few weeks of training were an incredibly frustrating yet humbling experience for me trying to keep every run in the prescribed zones. On the majority of my runs, I was accompanied by Impatience, who sat on my right shoulder, and Ego, who sat on the left.

Runners very often tend to get caught up in numbers, taking pride in faster paces, or feeling ashamed of slower paces. Whilst this training method might not make sense to every runner, for me it means injury and burn-out-free running in between races. I want sustainability in my life far more than a broken body and an exhausted mind.

At the end of the day, who cares about your pace anyway? If you are patient and stick with this training method, you can expect that your paces in particular zones to become faster over time. In other words, you will be running faster, and farther, with less effort. You will not only become a more efficient runner, but you will likely put both injuries and potential burnouts at bay.

Some runners say that injuries are inevitable, but I beg to differ. If you look after your body, have cutback weeks in your training programme and proper time off once in a while, eat and sleep well, hydrate and change your shoes when they are worn out, I believe you can avoid them.

The runner you are today is a product of your attention to those fundamental principles of consistency and adaptable progression from years past, not just weeks or months past. So, while you might have a base-building period early in the calendar year, appreciate that the entire year, and even the next year, is building the base for the runner that you can be in three years.

Listen to your body, you only get one.

My race strategy for the North Downs Way 50

In just 13 days I will be running the North Downs Way 50: a 50-mile foot race from Farnham in Surrey to Knockholt Pound in Kent. To most people this may seem like a long way to run, but to many ultra runners a 50 miler is the norm. It is an average distance for an ultra and a stepping stone to the 100 milers and beyond.

Copyright by Centurion Running ^

As much as I am slowly, but surely, becoming accustomed to the heart rate methodology, I plan to approach Race Day in a different way — by using the RPE scale. RPE stands for Rate of Perceived Exertion and when it comes to endurance races, it is probably the best metric you can focus on.

Heart rate training is great for base-building activities, and to speed the recovery up between the many training runs an ultra marathon plan will introduce you to, but in a race setting where I essentially will be up against time, I do not want that pressure of having to constantly check that I am below X bpm. I want the freedom of running to feel, within reason.

The race will take place on trails, where the terrain, gradients, and overall conditions will affect my heart rate greatly and I expect it to drift accordingly over time. The usual heart rate zones will then not apply, as they will not correlate with my overall exertion.

50 miles is a long way to go and I plan to start slow, and then slow down even more. If I am going to be running for 10+ hours, I do not want to burn out in the earlier stages. I want to arrive at the halfway point relatively fresh, as technically, the race does not start before the legs get heavy.

Besides, the race will be far more fun if I am the hunter rather than the one being hunted! To say that I am excited is a massive understatement. The masochist in me is ready to enter the hurt house once again, experience the pain and embrace it.

I hope some of these words will inspire other trail runners who perhaps need to switch things up and look deeper into ways of making their athleticism more sustainable in the long run. No pun intended...