This morning I headed out the door at 6:30 for my weekly long run and 17.5km later I was finished. The sole aim of the run was to put miles into my legs, to get them used to longer distances, and most definitely not to run fast, so with that in mind I kep to a very conservative pace, ensuring that I never felt out of breath the whole way, and my only discomfort was my quads getting a bit tired in the final 2-3km or so.

I ran the 17.5km in 1:33:21 at an average HR of 144 which I was pretty happy with. I’ve since looked up my old training records and realised that that’s the third-longest run I’ve ever done, with the longest ever being the time I did a half-marathon. I looked at my HR data from the half-marathon and noted that while my time was 1:51:59, my average HR was 169.

Doing a quick bit of maths on this morning’s run reveals that this I was running at a pace which would have yielded a 1:52:30 half-marathon, i.e: only 30secs slower than my best, yet my HR was a full 24bpm slower!

Looks like the training is paying off.