Saturday 26 March 2011

Half marathon training run up the Uetliberg with 526m of elevation gain

Hello again folks,

After 2 days of resting and letting my body recover, today was time to hit the road again.  The day started off with one hour of Pilates, and the teacher was happy with my progress.  She showed me some new exercises that apparently she wouldn't dream of doing with students until after 10 lessons minimum normally.  So far this is my 5th lesson.

Then I went back to home to get my little running doggy so we could go for our training run.  Unfortunately I hadn't charged my GPS watch beforehand so I had to make Negrita wait patiently while I charged it.  The problem is that the moment she sees me put on my running shoes she knows she is going out and starts getting excited.

GPS fully charged and out of the door we went.  I decided to run from home up to the top of the Uetliberg, and then provided I was feeling ok to run all the way back home as well.  I got to the bottom without any trouble at all and then the work started.  I was blowing pretty heavily the whole way up, but I didn't need to stop at all, except to get water whenever I saw a water trough.  I also managed to pass a couple of mountainbikers on the way up.  Only one passed me and I had overtaken him earlier which I don't think he liked very much.

The last few hundred metres to the top there were lots of wooden steps and running up those really made my heart rate rise.  I can see on Garmin Connect that my heart rate hit a maximum of 162bpm.  That may not sound so much to some of you, but I have an extremely low heart rate (resting rate is in the low 50s) and my lactate threshold is around 150bpm, so it was well above my lactate threshold.

When I got to the top I took a couple of minutes pause to catch my breath and then set off towards home.   I took a shorter route going home as the distance was clocking up, and I hadn't really planned on doing anything more than a half marathon today.  As I got within the last few km of home, both Negrita and I were suffering slightly from the run up the Uetliberg.  Total distance covered was 21km and total time taken was 2 hours 28 minutes and 3 seconds with an elevation gain of 526m.  The link to the data on Garmin connect is here http://connect.garmin.com/activity/75135702 (no prizes for guessing where the hill is on the elevation or heart rate graph).

I wish you all a nice Saturday and for me now I will take some rest and try to replace those 1,800 calories or so that I just burnt. Adios amigos.

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