Hooray for Jogging

Phew, well that Vivosmart HR review from yesterday ended up being an epic effort. I do a bit of planning before I sit down to write a review and I always think they won't take that long, but they always do. Glad I got there in the end though. As I mentioned yesterday I have been meaning to do that for ages, so I am glad I got around to it.

Nice quiet day today, a good finish to a weekend that has included a slow return to training. Yesterday I managed to get in 85km or so on the bike. Nothing earth shattering, but rather a nice spin. I bumped into a mate from Break Your Limits and spent a great time chatting to him for about half the ride. The legs were feeling the ride a little this morning, but not too badly. Good to get in a decent ride though.

This morning it was time for my first post plate jog. With my training program this week I have some very specific instructions for my run sessions and so my goal today was to replicate that. Easy jogging around 5 minute/km pace and no more than 8km. One of the things I was told by my physio last week was a contributor to my current knee/shin soreness can be letting my cadence fall to far. When you run slower, typically a couple of things happen. Either your stride length falls or your cadence drops, often both. Before I got hurt I was working a lot on stride length and so when I was running pre-surgery I was still focusing on that. However, because I was running slowly that meant that my cadence dropped a lot. That almost certainly contributed to my current niggle. Given that, this morning I was focusing on the opposite, keeping the cadence up and just tapping along. I still have a lot of work to do on my stride length, but that will have to wait until I am a bit more back up to speed.

With the above in mind, and making sure I was staying within the pain limits set by the physio, the run went well.  I managed to stay at the prescribed low intensity and so this was the first run I have had in ages that felt like I was sitting well within my limits. Unfortunately my heart rate monitor had other ideas, recording half the run at over 180bpm. I am a little baffled as to what went wrong there since I think I would have noticed if I was sitting above 180bpm for 20 minutes. Oh well, the quirks of technology I guess.

Tomorrow the training program starts for real and with it the gradual build back to race form.

After months of being injured and toddling around with training I am really looking forward to getting back on with it.