Yesterday my running partner and I braved the oncoming rain and headed out for a 10+ mile run. When I woke it was warm out with no sprinkles, so warm I passed on the tights. But the rain didn’t hold out for long and greeted us at the start of our run on the West side of the esplanade.

We have been talking about keeping our long runs slow so as to keep our heart rate under our recovery ceiling thus keeping us in the fat burning zone. The idea is to burn fat instead of reaching into our glucose stores. So like I said we have been talking about it and trying to do it. Today we both strapped on our Heart Rate Monitors and did it for real. We knew we were going to be going slow and that the full run would take around 2 hours. Our target heart rate was 147 and we were really successful in keeping it there. It was sort of fun to watch our heart rates so closely, we even managed to stay under on our small hills. My heart rate was a bit lower than my partner’s, but not much. Overall my average was 141 for the run with an avg pace of 10:45.

As we were finishing I really felt like I could run a full marathon at that pace. My feet were hurting a little bit but my legs and body felt great. I even considered adding and extra 5 miles to run home from downtown, but not seriously. My mile were high this week (36) and I didn’t want to push 40 yet. Later in the day I felt really good as well, not very tired and not very sore. I did quite a bit of stretching throughout the day and the next morning I felt a bit sore and tired, but not bad.

We are scheduled for a recovery run this morning of five miles. I just got a text hoping to put it off until tonight. Sounds good to me, I’m pretty pooped this morn.

I have been trying to figure my resting heart rate in the morning right after I wake up. The first time I tried it it was 46. The next day 47 and today 49. The cats kept jumping up on me while I was laying there and not helping. I want to measure how low I can get it while doing chi gong breathing exercises. I am sure it would go even lower.