And the latest 2 week report of me trying to get fit(tish) again

The first week I’m going to discuss was a bad one.

Whilst my job in itself is generally low-stress, when things happen unexpectedly, things can get pretty stressful, and that was very much present at the start of this week. Definitely not the sort of work week I enjoy. Couple this to sleeping (badly, apparently) in a weird position meant that I had a bad back and pain in my neck and shoulder all week. And as you can imagine, this didn’t have a positive impact on my sleep.

When Garmin won’t give you a workout

Each Garmin Daily Report spluttered at me that my sleep was bad. I mean, really bad. No $hit Sherlock, you try sleeping soundly when everything hurts because your body has decided to go into spasm……

Anyway, the net result was that trying to get Garmin to generate any sort of workout this week was nigh on impossible.

Not that I really felt “well” enough to do a workout. My HRV measurements were all out of whack, way higher than my average, and I’m really not sure what that actually means. I know if you’re sick it tends to go low, but what the other direction represents (other than out of balance) I’m not sure. The suggestions online seem to make this a good thing, but it’s clearly not the case based upon the week I’ve had. Whilst I ought to be rested from not doing any workouts, the discomfort and stressors resulting in a lack of sleep surely more than counter this.

It’s that familiar adage of having a load of data and a device suggesting it’s out of kilter but not actually explaining what it represents. I asked ChatGPT, you know that font of all knowledge 🤣. And it suggested everything was wonderful……… (The old lesson of don’t believe anything you read on the internet unless you can independently verify it).

As such, I didn’t do a training run at all until Friday of the week. I’d been out on the bike a few times, so it’s not that I wasn’t doing any physical exercise.  I’d also been back to running my intervals sessions at Marple Runners, so whilst I didn’t do anything specific, by the time I’d run the warm-ups/downs and jogged around the session I had accumulated 3.8 miles of something.

But come the Friday, I was getting twitchy that I hadn’t done anything “for me” on the running front. A run-commute was the solution I chose. Garmin wanted a recovery 30 minutes (of course it did) so instead I did an 8 mile route, out and back along the Middlewood Way to the job and went on feel, which seemed to translate to about 8 miles in 65 minutes at an average HR of about 137bpm. To be honest it was more a reflection of the frustration I was feeling. And there were a couple of pauses when I bumped into people I knew and stopped for a catch-up.

The downside of not being at Lyme is that my human contact is reduced. I say that’s a downside…….! I mean my positive human contact time is reduced 🤣.

Long and slow is the way to go

With another poor night (thanks for reminding me, Garmin) I decided it might be nice to try to do a long and slow steady run. Again, nothing hilly or technical, this was just an exercise in keeping the HR in check. My initial desires to run a HM distance were paired back mid run when I concluded that was too big a step from where my fitness currently is and that I didn’t want to break myself running the distance for the sake of it. In the end it became a 10 mile run with an average HR of 130bpm throughout. There was a spike due to a an anxiety moment that suddenly gripped me, but thankfully I managed to get things back under control almost as quickly as they had threatened to spiral out of control.

The big surprise of the week was an increase in VO2max. Based on the week it had been, I didn’t see that coming and I’m sure it’ll drop back again once it’s realised that it has crept up. It has left me wondering exactly what that means in the scheme of my own fitness; it’s certainly a higher figure than it was in 2013 where I was banging out HM times between 1:35 and 1:45 almost without thinking about it, yet I doubt I could run 13 miles in anything close to that time now.

The fatal flaw?

What I have noticed is that whilst I’m having ‘bad sleep’, Garmin automatically adjusts the next run to accommodate it. Which is good to a point, but given its algorithm claims I always have bad sleep, except on the odd occasion, it means that more often than not, the suggested workout is a 40 minute recovery run.  Which is fine if you’ve not set the watch to a goal, but if you have, I’m not sure how it expects the runner to actually train for that goal.

Whilst I don’t have a goal as such, in order to generate a “plan” from my watch in order to test it out, I decided to focus on being able to run a half-marathon distance in October, without stopping. Based upon my running history, this ought to not be much of a goal. However, with all the time off over the last 3 years, it’s giving me something to aim at.

The net result is that, whilst I wanted to just use Garmin’s “coach”, I’ve found myself having to step in more and more in order to do the type of workouts that might actually lead towards completing a 13.1 mile distance, rather than just going for a 30 minute jog every day.

Skewed loading

Another consequence of this is a skewing of the load. Garmin likes to inform the user of the relative balance of  anaerobic, high aerobic and low aerobic loadings; the theory being that these should be balanced to improve fitness, rather than being heavily skewed to one or another. So if Garmin insists on setting a low aerobic recovery run every day, of course these results are going to be skewed. And I’m not sure where the algorithmic logic works within that because it’s introducing a bias based upon it changing the planned workouts.

A bigger week

This last week really just followed on as the previous one, although I did manage to spread out 4 runs over 6 days. Something that was more impressive due to the amount of work I have on at the moment. I also continued cross-training by riding my bike to some of my jobs; I think in the last 4 weeks I’ve cycled about 130 miles, which isn’t too shabby for someone who isn’t really a cyclist.

I started the week with a 39 minute run @8.30min/mile pace, trying to maintain the whole run with nasal breathing. The theory being this should keep the pace more gentle and make it a base run; in practice I still managed to get my HR into zone 4 albeit a section heading up a slight incline!

The following day I ran my 5 mile town loop in the clockwise direction. It’s a route I’ve used for most of the time I’ve done running, with little elevation change and few complications with only a couple of road crossings to manage. Again it was roughly at 8.30min/mile pace which led to the frustration about following a plan for a goal when Garmin just gives you the same workout day in and day out.

On Thursday, Garmin wanted me to do a 40 minute recovery/base run. This wasn’t in my plan! I decided instead I wanted to do a proper speed session, and loaded my own into my watch. Broadly speaking it was:

• 15 minutes warm-up
• 4km at marathon pace
• 3km at half-marathon pace
• 2km at 10km pace
• 1km at 5km pace
• 10 minutes cool-down plus stretching

The idea is to build the stamina over a greater distance and really focus on trying to maintain being able to hold the pace as the sections get faster. Overall it worked out at 9 miles in distance. My Garmin has been tracking my recent fitness over the past 3 months and it has given me some race predictions for those distances, which is what I used for the paces.

Garmin Race Predictions (or hallucinations?)

Interestingly before I did the work-out I thought the predictions were somewhat optimistic, but after it, they had been improved by a significant amount again which was something of a surprise. I know back when I was regularly racing and was actually fit, the race predictions were pretty close to what I had achieved (save for the marathon as I never managed to run one at my peak fitness as I always broke myself during the training!). But for now, it’s comedically optimistic and I don’t think I could do anyone of them save for in free-fall out of the stratosphere!

This run drained my training readiness and whilst I would have preferred to leave my longer run until the Sunday, my workload was such that this wasn’t feasible. So Saturday it was. And in the end I ran a 9.5 miler to and from one of my jobs which was in a totally different direction to all the other ones. The plan had been to do 11 miles, but I was already tired and lacking in spare time, so that had to do. It was a slow and steady affair, with a small amount of incline (about 100m). A case of ‘it did the job’.

So the total mileage for this week was  28 miles.