Heart rate training, shoes, and veggies

This weekend I did something I haven’t done for months – I ran without my heart rate monitor. It was liberating and it was glorious not to hear my Garmin’s obnoxious chime that my heart rate was too high.

I had a realization this past week when I was getting increasingly frustrated with how slow I’m still going and how much I’m still walking on my runs. The baby still wakes up at night. Sometimes it’s just once, but a lot of nights, it is 2 or 3 times. On the especially bad nights, it is impossible to keep my heart rate down when I run the next day. Impossible. My run ends up being more like a walk with running breaks than a run with walking breaks.

I realized that as much as I really do believe in this form of training, I don’t think it’s going to work for me right now. Sure, it’s probably not the healthiest thing to push my body on my runs when I am so sleep deprived, but I don’t think I’m going to see enough improvement doing the Maffetone method at this point. It sucks to have put 3 months into this training and to not continue, but it what it is. I will try again when my kids let me get a little more sleep at night.

I never did post about how my pace changed doing the Maffetone method. Here’s the summary:

Pre-Maffetone – I was running about 10-10:30 miles.
Beginning Maffetone – During my first MAF test, my average pace (including walking breaks) was in the 13s. THIRTEEN. Three minutes slower per mile than what I was running before.
Quitting Maffetone – My pace most recently while still doing the heart rate training was down to the 12s. That’s a decent improvement, but it’s still too slow for me to mentally accept right now.

The unfortunate thing is that now that I have ditched my HR strap on my runs, I’m not magically back to running the pace I was before I started heart rate training. I know, duh. My pace now is in the 11s, but in my defense, that pace has been while pushing one or both kids so I don’t know yet what my solo pace will look like. I’m sure it’s still going to be pretty darn slow.

The other piece of the puzzle is my pleurisy. I was still coming back to running after that health setback when I started the HR training so my body wasn’t in the best shape to begin with. I still don’t feel 100% recovered from that experience so I think that’s probably not helping either. I really do want to revisit this method in the future.

One good thing about my running is I think I finally found my perfect minimalist running shoe – the Skora Running Form (psst, they have some pretty awesome sales going on right now). I had a hard time finding a shoe that was zero drop and and had the right level of cushioning for me. Some shoes I tried were too cushy, others where too minimal. The Form feels just right for me.