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city to bay 2005 fun run
There we go, that was the 2005 City to Bay Fun Run. Glad that was over and done with even if it did cause me infra-patella tendinopathy (i.e. i tore the tendon in my right knee). Apparently this is caused by overuse, but it shouldn’t happen normally, it’s due to my tight hamstrings - as is every over-training injury I seem to get. I think there’s a pattern here. So the question is how did I go this year? Not as well as i was hoping! If I never had ilio-tibial band friction syndrome over the summer for 6 or so months in my left knee, and I could therefore have trained solid for the last 12 months, I was expecting to pull off less than 44 minutes. Since I’ve basically only had 1 month training since I healed this injury in the left knee, I only shaved off 11 seconds. The other thing to consider though is that it was 12.1km this year, compared to 12.0km last year (and I was running on a torn tendon!) I still could have done better, and here’s proof that I could have pushed myself more if my knee didn’t bung out.
2004:
Average heart rate 186bpm, final heart rate 198bpm
2005:
Average heart rate 182bpm, final heart rate 170bpm
There is no doubt that I am stronger, faster, more durable and have better endurance than ever before, so why was my heart rate lacking? The weather conditions are not to blame, since 2004 and 2005 were exactly the same 22 deg Celcius last year and this year. I believe it can be proven that it was my torn tendon holding me back, by looking at the graph below (you may want to click on it to enlarge it).
If you look roughly three quarters along the way, where I would have hit the 9km mark (i.e. 3km to go, and just trust me when I say I was keeping the pace constant, because I recalculated it in my head at every 1km sign) that my heart rate dropped to 170bpm. It did this, because as I started to increase the pace by roughly 10% by lifting myself to around 190bpm, I first noticed the pain in my knee. This caused for an interesting mental challenge. So I adjusted how I was running on my knee and then the bpm kicked back up, but as you can see it then faded away as I slowed down when the pain kicked in big time, and by the end of the 12.1km I was just hanging in there, and could barely walk from the finish line to 10m away to the Powerade stand.