Tackling a 10k with heart rate in mind

So after doing 5km runs for a while now I have started to feel as though rather than it being a question of whether or not I CAN do them, it becomes a question of how fast I can do them. I recall back to the day of being so proud of myself for running (let's be honest, jogging) the entire thing without stopping. Nowadays that is just easy and i find myself chasing a time per km and trying to get under 30 minutes for the entire thing.

But at the same time while I enjoy completing these things it isn't really in line with what it is that I am training for right now and that is a half marathon run coming up in a few months. That will be a true test for me and instead of focusing on running 5k faster, I need to determine what speed I can maintain for longer periods of time.

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To the hardcore sorts out there, a 10k is child's play but for me, it is something I have only attempted a few times in my life and I was significantly younger when I did them. My objective on this day was based on what I had learned in the past about my own heart rate because for whatever reason, I have a rather high BPM even if I am more fit that the person that I am comparing it to.

As you can see, as soon as I hit the 10k mark I immediately quit but I did run the entire thing or at least, kept moving with a jog like stride. My main focus here was to keep my heart rate down though and to just accept the fact that lower heart rate means slower stride and for me, at times, it felt like I was doing more of a power walk than a run and this makes me feel silly.

The objective here was to not cross over into 170 at all. When I am doing my 5k's where I am pushing for 5 minutes per km, I am ALWAYS over 170 and there are times that I feel seriously overheated. I want to find what I can sustain because over 30 minutes at a near 180 BPM, that's not comfortable or given my age, probably not even safe. I don't know but I don't want to find out the hard way. You can see above that there are some serious dips in my BPM but this was where I slowed down a lot because my heart rate briefly jumped above 170 and I want to avoid this.

Here are my per km splits and something that I learned because of it. For one, I am starting out too fast (or am i?) and I think this is because I am used to running 5k's and that is actually a slow pace for me as far as those are concerned. I was using my BPM as my only limiting factor and as has been shown in previous runs, no matter what I am shooting for my BPM is always low at the start. By going "too fast" at the start of this 10k I feel as though I did too things to myself: I gassed myself a bit and I also got used to a certain pace so when I did slow down in km's 6-10 it felt like I was going extremely slow when in reality I was going a normal pace (for me) for accomplishing this feat. I don't have the world's most fancy watch and it can't really give me real time representations of my pace, so this is something I am going to have to work out just by knowing my body.

in the end of it all I learned a bit about myself and that is good seeing as how this is just the first 10k I have ever tried to do in the past 6 years or so. I know that i need to start out slower and perhaps just accept that I may actually need to have an old-man-stride in order to be able to somewhat comfortably be able to get through this at all. I will admit there were a few times that I did stop and walk due to heart rate reasons so maybe I need to set alarms on my watch to better be able to keep track of this.

For me this is my most limiting factor. I rarely if ever experience muscle fatigue, I almost never have any sort of breathing fatigue or whatever that is called - I always have enough breath is what I mean. The main thing holding me back is that I get extremely hot and my heart rate is too high. In order to avoid needing to walk, I am going to need to slow the heck down.

Why not just stop and walk? Well, I'll tell you why and anyone that runs will be able to relate to this. Just like the laws of motion in science, the same is true of motion in a person: If I start walking, i want to STAY walking, but if I just remain jogging, it is much easier for me to stay in that form. I've read and hear over and over that long-distance running is just several hours of you playing mind games with yourself and I honestly believe that to be true. In the end of it all this is not something where I, or most people, is actually pushing themselves to their physical limit, we aren't fast enough for that... what we are doing is second-guessing ourselves constantly and thinking about how wonderful it would be to not be running anymore. This is something that I think almost any runner can relate to.

So my next plan of attack is going to be to start out even slower and be aiming for going a long way comfortably rather than trying to get there quickly.

This is all progress in my book, not necessarily the way I want it to go, but it is progress nonetheless.