November 17th 2020
Today I am starting my official marathon training!My plan is to run the Lauwersoog marathon on the 2nd of May 2021. Which happens to be the day I turn 42. I thought it was a too beautiful coincidence to let go.
I will follow the Garmin Intermediate Marathon training plan based on heart rate zones as my guide. It is a plan for 16 weeks, so I will have to repeat some of the weeks. But I never trained purely on heart rate before, so this will give me a few weeks to practice using the heart rate zones.
I run three times a week. On Sundays we run with the family, so it’s difficult to see this as a real training moment, but we are doing it together and we are outside and running, so that’s just good. But the Tuesday is my ‘interval day’ and Friday my ‘long run’ day. I like to run ‘fast’ (that is always relative, isn’t it, hahaha) on shorter time-spans, because it is so nice to see a bit of high speeds on your recording and it feels nice to be able to just run as fast as you can. But I can also immensely enjoy the long runs, where you are just alone with your own thoughts and, going at the right pace, you have the feeling you could go on forever.
In any case, I started this week with an interval. 4 x 4 minutes in zone 4. For me, that is between 156-164 bpm. I adjusted the watch in order to show me the graph of my heart rate above and then heart rate en heart rate zone below that. That works really nicely as you see the graph being drawn while you run. I also realised that I really like keeping the watch in my hand, so I do not need to turn my wrist to look at the numbers, but just need to glance down at the right moment. Seeing the graph is nice, because you are able to focus on the trend of the heart-rate instead of one measurement.