Feeling Sluggish? First, your body is getting adjusted to training. Second, Stress of any kind is still stress. During this training period, your heart rate can rise due to an increase in heat and/or humidity, especially if your body has not fully acclimated to our seasonal weather change. When you’re not acclimated, your heart has to pump more oxygenated blood to the surface of your skin to keep it cool. This means less oxygen is available for the energy conversion process. Less oxygen indicates your body will go anaerobic sooner than anticipated. Going anaerobic marks the beginning of lactic acid accumulation. Lactic acid accumulation means you will become tired “feeling sluggish”. All of these factors causes a rise in heart rate.
Several pearls of wisdom:
- Day-to-day variations of your heart rate averages 6 BPM (beats per minute)
- You can easily become dehydrated when training and/or racing, reason being, research has found that one’s heart rate increases 7 BPM for every 1% loss of body weight due to dehydration. An increase in temperature of 10° can cause one’s heart rate to increase by 10 BPM; When you’re endurance running and/or racing it can rise even more.
We all have our “good” and “bad” experiences with training days and/or races.
The most important “take-away”: HYDRATE and be consistent with your training plan. Take days easy as indicated or rest, meaning, rest your body. Our Saturday morning runs are supposed to be nice and easy not a fast race pace event. General rule of thumb, your long runs should be 2-3 minutes slower than your actual race pace.
What should my long runs consist of? (based on distances and gradual long mile increase) If training for a:
- 5k = longest run 5 no longer than 6 miles
- 10k = longest run 8 no longer than 9 miles
- 21k (half marathon) = 16 no longer than 17 miles
- Marathon = that’s a whole different ball game… you need to get several long runs in based on training plan.
Keep in mind, if you’re training for a short distance race, running long runs will affect your short distance same goes for a long distance runner. To illustrate, you wouldn’t ask a marathoner to race a 1 mile race, it would injure the long endurance athlete because they are not trained for short distances. Same concept goes for the mile runner, they are not prepared for endurance training since they are focused and trained more on speed.