Australia 4 Qatar 0

Mon 9.5k 48:12 (HR 137 5:04) 695 93
Tue 18.0k 1:33:11 (HR 137 5:10) 709 102
Wed Socceroo duty
Thu 18.0k 1:31:41 (HR 137 5:05) 697 95
Fri 13.0k 1:04:00 (HR 139 4:55) 684 82
Sat Rest
Sun 25.0k 2:08:40 (HR 148 5:08) 761 112

Week 83.5k
Oct 244k
Year 2626k

Maybe there was some lessons to be learnt from last week. Wednesday was the Socceroo's World Cup Qualifying game against Qatar, so I took the night off. It turned out to be a good decision because their was an enormous thunderstorm which started about 6:30pm. Lots of lightning , buckets of rain and it all delayed the kick-off by 30 minutes. It did mean that the training runs on Thursday and Friday were far more satisfactory in terms of performance than most have been lately.

But by Sunday, even though my long run was around 3 minutes faster than last week it was done at a higher heart rate (148 vs 144). At it seems I am still a long way from matching my fitness from July when I did this run 6 minutes faster at the same 148 Heart Rate. So it still seems a bit up and down with a fair way to go back to top condition.

Ewen was questioning my Index of (Heart Rate * pace). It is the blue number above. Whilst I agree that it has some limitations, for my runs in the 70 - 80% Max HR Zone I find it useful. For runs above that Heart Rate Zone a more useful index I use is (HR - 50) * (Pace -4). This figure is in red. It gives a bit more weighting to pace but I am not doing much training in that zone at the moment. If anyone has the perfect index to compare one run to another I am all ears.

Pretty Numbers

29th Sep - 5th October 6th - 12th October
Mon 9.5k 48:39 (HR 133 5:07) 681 47:20 (HR 138 4:58) 687
Tue 13k 1:05:58 (HR 141 5:04) 715 1:07:42 (HR 136 5:12) 708
Wed 13k 1:08:55 (HR 134 5:18) 710 1:07:31 (HR 135 5:11) 701
Thu 13k 1:08:19 (HR 132 5:15) 693 1:08:44 (HR 134 5:17) 708
Fri 18k 1:36:28 (HR 138 5:21) 739 1:31:48 (HR 139 5:06) 702
Sat Rest
Sun 25k 2:13:46 (HR 139 5:21) 743 2:11:37 (HR 144 5:15) 758

Week 91.5k

Oct 160k
Year 2546k

The last two weeks I have done the same sessions on the same days. At the moment it is all just low aerobic runs in the 70 - 75% of Max HR zone. The results are a bit up and down. The numbers in red are my own index which I use to compare runs based on (HR * pace). I would expect a slight progressive decrease in values but it has been up and down like this for the last month.

I said I would review my goals at the start of October and given the figures I have abandoned the plan to race a 10k this year. I will now just go into base building for the next four or five months. The new goal is to do at least 400k a month over that period.