training radio silence broken

15Mar07

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For nearly two weeks now I’ve posted no training information, or daily data updates. I’ve not trained because of a virus. On a daily basis my resting heart rate has been 50 bpm, against a pre-virus of 44-48. The virus seems to have reached fairly deep into my upper respiratory tract, although not too severely.

I’ve not felt inclined to exercise at all. Talking to the folks at Polar today, that disinclination is actually a helpful signal.

This approach also seems vindicated by my discovery this week of Art De Vany’s blog. Art’s business is uncertainty, and so it is interesting that he devotes so much to questions of exercise. I’ll deal more in later posts with Art’s work, some of which on “Holywood economics” I was already vaguely familiar with through Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness. To cut to the chase, Art’s position on exercise is that we should emulate our hunter-gatherer ancestors. That means marathons are not a good idea, and our modern diets are actually bad for us. Given that part of my instinct to run long distance was based on an intuition that it reflected a hunter-gatherer past, this is actually quite shocking.

Anyway, more on Art in due course. I’m still not over this virus, and that is more than 5 weeks training in 9 that I’ll have lost, which really puts the London Marathon project in jeopardy. I’m due to run the Bath Half Marathon in a week and a half. I could still do this at a push, just treating it as a long run. But the advice from Polar was to rethink.

Resting heart rate 50 bpm

Weight 72 kg

Mood