I blame myself.
And the three women and a dog.
I got off to an unusually early start this morning, beginning my run at just after 9 a.m. I opted to go clockwise around the lake again, and the plan was to moderate my pace a bit and see if I could extend beyond 5K.
Ho ho.
What happened instead is as I was getting a drink at the fountain, near my starting point, three women went jogging past me with an unleashed dog. The dog seemed well-behaved, but still, bad people! I decided to let them go on for a bit before heading out, so there would be a nice gap between us.
What I should have done is waited at least a few minutes, which would have made catching up much more challenging. Instead, I was only just onto the Avalon trail (the first stretch of the run) when I saw I was clearly closing the gap with them and would need to decide whether I wanted to slow down to stay behind them, or put on the boosters to get by and establish a comfortable gap with me in front.
I went for the latter.
As I blazed along I looked at the watch and noticed it wasn’t getting a heart rate. My heart was definitely beating, so I tried pausing and unpausing the run to see if that might help. It didn’t. By now I was at 0.87 km into the run and still no heart rate. As I am monitoring my BPM much more closely now, this was a point of consternation. When it finally kicked it, it reported a BPM of 170, which is uncomfortably above my “safe” level, so I slowed my pace and ended with perhaps the biggest drop-off ever from one km to the next:
- First km: 5:47/km
- Second km: 6:26/km
Basically, I started out so fast that I burned out, then still had 4 km to go. Whoops. I actually got progressively faster, finishing with a 6:09/km pace in the final stretch.
The trouble acquiring a heart rate has happened a few times now. By coincidence, I have started looking seriously at a Garmin watch for my runs, to get better and more detailed metrics than Apple offers.
I did manage to find enough energy to do a lot of running on the remaining stretch around the lake, so that was nice. And I also have to consider it’s only been two days since my last trip around the lake, so I am pushing myself more now. In that light, things went pretty well.
Stats:
Run 683 Average pace: 6:13/km Location: Burnaby Lake (CW) Start: 9:05 a.m. Distance: 5:02 km Time: 31:16 Weather: Cloudy Temp: 16ºC Humidity: 93% Wind: light BPM: 153 Weight: 169.8 Total distance to date: 5020 km Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Brooks Caldera 5 (135 km)
