I still can

Sorry for the bad photo, let’s just say I tried to match the quality of the photo with the quality of today’s sunrise: no evidence of it!

As mentioned yesterday, I am working (still) on increasing my cadence. Gareth had spotted a pattern on one of my runs and that was that it goes down over the course of time. I’ve looked at past runs and that is indeed a pattern … same today:

My theory as to why that happens is: To run with a high cadence I still need to focus and concentrate. This drifts off towards the end of the run. My first goal now is to get one of my runs done at an average cadence of over 170. This will probably take me quite a while, but maybe I can use autumn and winter to work on this.

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+10% and the new easy

Finally recovery week is over and I decided to do a 10% increase this week. This will have me running 44 minutes on my easy days (Mo/We/Fr), 88 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 132 minutes on Saturdays. While I get used to it, I will try and only run at or below my target heart rate. Once this gets easy I’ll switch back to 80/20.

Today’s run was fantastic. Let me tell you about it. Weather is perfect at the moment – not warm or humid at all, the air clear, clean and fresh. The sea was nearly still and the clouds and everything … just … perfect:

The weather and beautiful area isn’t the only perfect thing. Last week I had found the perfect music to work on increasing my cadence, but it turned out I had done the math wrong. After reading something completely unrelated about brain waves over the weekend I realized that 60 bpm wasn’t just perfect for the brain … it can also be multiplied by 3 and we get the magic 180! Now everyone that is laughing right now, you could have told me! … anyhow … after realizing this over the weekend I got the classical music back out and it just works!

Not that my cadence was now magically at 180 … sorry no. It was 159 however it felt easy! Now it gets a bit more complicated … stay with me. I also mentioned before that I got faster at my existing heart rate. The faster wasn’t yet comfortable and I was working on making this easier. Today it both came together and my cadence is at least improving and my new 8:35 average beach pace feels easy.

With this and my new increase in duration I’ll be clocking in a 5k on every easy day … the week before recovery week I ran 44k in one week. I am curious how things play out and if I can actually manage to run at my new easy pace for the rest of the week.

Quicker

During today’s quick recovery run I focused on a higher cadence or better … quicker steps. What I’ve been struggling with, at least in my head, is how to run at a high cadence while still running slow. I know it’s possible, I’ve seen people do it … I just can’t seem to do it over a longer period of time. Well … progress is always slow and so I am happy to see, that at least today shows a bit of an improvement.

My average heart rate was 137, running at 9:35 min/km and a cadence of 157. Other than that, recovery week is happening and I feel sloth all around! Looking forward to next week.