It was a red letter day Friday because Polar delivered their new RS800sd Heart Rate Monitor to test and review. It is a fabulous-looking device and with accompanying foot pod a whole lot lighter than my “old” S625x. I’m not big on gadgets and new toys, but the inner male is coming out in me on this one. Today it had its first outing. I will still need to calibrate the cadence pod, which measures and can evaluate the quality of my running stride. That should help with efficiency, as Polar indicate even someone as fit as Lance Armstrong appeared to have been overstriding during his New York Marathon attempt last November.

Today was a shortish steady run.

Resting Heart Rate 48

Weight 71.5 kg

Mood

Exercise energy consumed 520 kcal (10 mins bike, 35 mins steady run)

Interesting research from London’s Portland Hospital reported yesterday by the BBC, indicates that some women are more vulnerable to ligament injury as part of their menstrual cycle:-

“Midway through the cycle, the level of the female sex hormone oestrogen, which gives strength to muscles and ligaments, drops dramatically, resulting in sudden weakness.”

There must be myriad under-researched possibilities such as these that mitigate against a work-based training programme. The question would be: to what extent can a recovery-based approach to training counteract this hormonal effect? Heart-rate monitor makers have shown that a lot of body function is correlated with heart rate. Would a sophisticated enough monitor point up whether you are more prone to such weakness?

Today I did not use the bike to warm up, nor did I stretch. I didn’t have time and used my run to recover the car from the garage in town. I could not stretch afterwards either (which I don’t normally do anyway.) My left thigh feels weaker than for a long while, and I feel much stiffer. Who says stretching doesn’t matter?

Resting heart rate 48

Weight 72 kg

Mood

Exercise energy consumed 399 kcal (34 mins run)

The first time in recorded literature Paula Radcliffe and PG Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster have not only shared a sentence (this one) but a headline (you clicked on it). What they have in common is cold bathing. I too have joined these honoured ranks. It feels like madness, and perhaps it induces it. But there are good reasons to follow the model, not least that Seneca (the champion stoic) favoured cold baths and long runs. Endurance training after all is a form of modern stoicism.

The Bath University Human Performance Centre advises the following regime:- alternating cold and warm showers for 30 seconds, three times each, as hot and cold as you can bear.

Sports psychologists have shown that cold showers not only reduce stress, but increase mental agility and toughness. The reason to adopt the contrast bathing approach above is to develop recovery. Using “intervals” of cold then hot is supposed to speed the removal of toxins from exercised muscles by stimulating blood flow. It certainly does that at this time year when the cold is particularly cold.

Today was a rest day, and I started using the recovery test in my Polar S625x running computer. For two weeks, I take a test three mornings each week to establish a baseline. This involves lying for a minute or so, usually pre-breakfast, in a quiet room with no distractions, and then standing for about the same. Thereafter I repeat the test a minimum of three times a week to measure, through variation in heart-rate during the “exercise” to determine to what extent the body has recovered. There is a total of eight different states from recovered to severely overtrained. The computer can even observe if my training is becoming too monotonous leading to a negative effect.

My resting heart rate was a bit variable this morning, but at its lowest (briefly 44 bpm) much lower than I have seen for a while.

Resting heart rate 48

Weight 71 kg

Mood

Rest day, no exercise

If you are offended by smileys and a fan of the “smiley” intervention on YouTube then don’t read on.

My blog is covered in smileys. I use only three ( and ) to indicate my prevailing daily mood. By monitoring mood, excercise scientists say, we can get an early indication of overtraining. Too many s and the signs are you should be resting more. Clearly my three-week virus involved an almost continuous line of s.

That mood modulates with exertion sounds terribly obvious, but we are not very good at responding to it. Since I started doing this, strangely enough, I’ve found it much easier to get over bad moods, and not let it affect work or other areas of life. With the appropriate rest, a lot of bad mood can be overcome. However, if you overstress yourself when you’re already in a bad mood, whether through doing too much or (in this case) overtraining, then things may go quickly from bad to worse.

I was very focused on staying within heart rate zone when running today. So when my heart rate computer says “no”, I slow right down. One area where I’ve been much more negligent is in making sure I get eight hours sleep. That also means looking at the watch, and doing what it says. Most nights the past few weeks I’ve been too close to only getting six hours. I’m going to try now to respond to the clock the same way I do to the heart rate monitor.

I also reckoned today that there are less than two and a half months to the Flora London Marathon. I’ve had to resume my long run at a lower level than pre-virus and build up again, leaving me short of training miles. This will make me much more vulnerable to the dreaded “wall”. That’s enough to put me in a bad mood. But on the positive side, I hoped that if everything else in training goes perfectly, I could still be in fantastic shape. And the long run, while necessary, does not alter the huge volume of mileage I will have put in over the past few months, and in the final build up.

Resting heart rate 49 bpm

Mood

Weight 72 kg

Total exercise energy burned 979 kcal (1:07 hours run, 10 mins bike)

There is a great book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Fooled by Randomness, which examines the role of luck in all areas of life, particularly business and investing.

Taleb is a professor of mathematics and a derivatives trader. Not much to do with sport. But his business is complexity. There is something in statistics called “survivorship bias”. There is a danger that what we measure excludes those that have fallen by the wayside, distorting our view of the world.

Sport is a bit like that when it comes to injury and overtraining. The winner is the best on the day, and not necessarily the best over time. What we certainly don’t see at all are the no-shows, the non-runners, the might-have-beens. Imagine England’s rugby performance over the past few years if Jonny Wilkinson had not been injured.

Taleb is a fitness fanatic and keen cyclist. He says he is not interested in competitive sports, so he does not offer much to help an athlete understand success, except to offer the proverbial observation that a baseball hitter is normally cursed when he appears on the front of Sports Illustrated as it is normally followed by a reversal in fortune. (Mathematically, the previous winning streak was in fact an unsustainable run of luck).

In competitive sport, luck is not very likely to take an average athlete to a gold medal. But bad luck will certainly remove good prospects from the population of potential winners. Reducing that component of luck is what athletes strive for. In my own more modest marathon ambitions, I’m trying to do the same. Except there is not any pressure to win, just a pressure to turn up. That is not a small pressure, and if you are raising money for a charity, that pressure builds the nearer you get to the day. I ran my first marathon injured and while still recovering from a virus, dangerously toughing it out so as not to let down those who’d sponsored me.

Continue reading ‘luck, latent talent and training’