Getting my LSD

ham­mer­head will be proud of me today, I think. After all the fight­ing I’ve done with him over the heartrate I should tar­get when I run, today I went out and actu­al­ly did Long Slow Distance.

I strapped on the heartrate mon­i­tor and went out for a run and stuck reli­gious­ly to a heartrate of 155. When I’d see it creep­ing up toward 160, I’d slow it down and ease up. This kept me right about at 10 mins/mile, and I just poured the miles on.

I con­fess that as I got to the end I let myself speed up a bit. I was get­ting anx­ious to have the run over with! Even in that last three miles I kept my heartrate under 170, aver­ag­ing 165 for the last 3 miles. The over­all aver­age heartrate for the run was 157.

Even though I let myself “slide” at the end, I feel good about exer­cis­ing a bit of dis­ci­pline and stick­ing with the goal I set out to achieve, despite my con­stant urge to kick up the speed. And in the end, my speed was up. I used to gripe because in order to hit the heartrate zones was rec­om­mend­ing, I had to go out and do 13 minute miles, which was discouraging.

Tonight I ran 14 miles in 2:12:04. That’s a 9:44 pace on what is to date my longest run.