Wednesday Rest Day; Tuesday Vertical Running and Bike

Today, I did nothing. Not because anything was wrong. I wanted to start to solidify my training for the season. I find it hard to "plan" and train at the same time. So I decided to just plan today.

Yesterday, I got vertical and ran up and down a flight and a half of stairs for about half an hour. Then I rode my bike for about 45 min. The key is to keep these efforts strictly aerobic, deeply aerobic if possible. On the bike I can tell my ability to govern this low intensity effort is coming back. I was able to ride at about 4 beats per minute lower than I was on Monday. I find to do this type of work, I really need to turn my focus inward. Typically, I've used an Ipod to facilitate this type of riding, but the last few times I've worked on just working with my own breath.

I think this has some benefit because I was able to discover, for example, that I've been riding with a slight amount of tension in my lower left leg and foot. So I spent most of the ride working out a strategy to counteract this and learn to relax the leg. I can only imagine the amount of tension I hold in the leg when I'm racing. But that is one of the lessor known benefits of training at low heart rate. You can actually feel what is going on in your body. So I found if I just concentrate on my big toe and the one next to it, my whole left leg relaxes. Again it is the whole thing about connecting through the feet.

As for the vertical running (basically up and down a flight of stairs for almost 30 minutes) that is going to take some work to get my heart rate to stay under aerobic threshold. But all it means is that instead of a continuous set like I did on Tuesday, I'll just do intervals until I get within 10 beats of AT and then walk until it comes down. That way I get to keep doing a workout I find more beneficial for my running overall than straight distance as well as work at burning fat as a fuel source.