Eight weeks to go and as of this post we are still $2,834 away from our goal. Please people we need your help! I know a lot of the people that read this are people that have already given and we thank you but if you haven’t given please consider it, every bit helps. I also ask that you please pass this site on to your friends and family, help us make a difference.

 With that being said it has been a few weeks since my last post and all is going well, I guess. OK everything is not going well, I am tired! I am tired of running. I am tired of triathlons. I am tired of the heat. I am tired of work. I am tired of going to the gym. I tired of riding my stationary bike. I am tired of cutting the damn grass. I am tired of doing the laundry. I am tired of doing the dishes. I am tired of getting up at 4:00am every morning. Do you get the picture? I am just TIRED!!!!! BUT as Timbeaux has said in one of his previous post “the show must go on”! I hate to give Tim credit but it made a lot of since and with every long run I do I keep telling myself “the show must go on”. The kids at St. Jude don’t have a choice they must continue on, so I must continue on. I have got to do this. OK, I am done complaining, I just needed to vent a little.

 Back to my training. My running is going well, my long runs are up to 16 miles on the weekend, my Tuesday and Thursday runs are around 6 to 8 miles and I am now trying to add a couple of recovery runs in between if time allows. For the month of September my total mileage on runs alone was 87 and for the month of October it needs to be more. My running times are not all that good but I’m still hoping that it will all come together as my fitness level goes up and the temperatures come down. Please temperature, come down.

 I have also started running with my heart rate monitor more and more and that has slowed me down considerably. I kept seeing the headlines:

 “40 Year Old Man’s Chest Explodes While Training for Marathon”

 I had no idea that my heart rate could get so high. For those who have never monitored your HR while you run or if you are smarter than me and don’t run. Here is how the HR thing works. The old rule school of thumb for maximum heart rate is 220-your age = Max HR. So for me that would be 220-40=180. There are also dozens of other calculators on how to get your maximum HR. I think I tried all the different methods and I came up with an average of about 185 beats per minute maximum. So I am calling my MAX HR 185. With that said there are 5 different zones in which you can train, they Recovery (Healthy Heart), Endurance (Weight Manage), Strength (Aerobic Threshold), Interval (Anaerobic Threshold) and Race Day (Red Line).

 

Somebody correct me if I am wrong but shouldn’t running 26.2 miles be considered ENDURANCE! Me being the person that I am and thinking that I know more than the people that come up with this stuff have been training in the Race Day (Red Line) zone from day 1. The more I read about it the dumber I felt. I started looking back through some of my HR data and realized that on some runs 2 miles in I was running around 95% of my MAX HR and it only got worse from there. The longer I would run, the slower I would go and the higher my HR would go. Talk about counter productive. On one run I actually hit 195 beat per minute, looking back I do not know what in the hell I was thinking? See what I mean with the headlines? Anyway I am now running slower but feel like I might actually have a chance to make it 26.2 miles.

Until next time here is a quote from Jim Rohn.

“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”