Well I went on this run and it was a really good run. I ran by myself because the others weren’t ready and I’m a bit of a creature of trend and so I go when I’ve planned to go, I go. Not much changes my mind.

 It turned out to be a pretty speedy run (4”40) and I had complete control of the pace, distance and route. I really enjoyed it.

Here are the details:

I switched out the route many times on the run and that was fun. The nice thing about being out on your own, almost always the ability to indulge yourself in whatever strikes your fancy. If I saw a cool little path out from the side, I’d take it and see where it goes. If I wanted to cut through the park and come out the other side, I’d do that too.

I ran further than usual, past the entrance to Victoria Park and carried on running-on the canal. I’m a usual 8-10km runner. Anything more than that and I’m not really accustomed to it. These wednesday runs of late have been around 12km which is a bit of a push and that’s good.

I’ve started paying attention generally to my heart rate since I bought my 235. According to it I’ve got a VO2 Max of 60ml/kg and a resting heart rate of around 50bpm. This is all quite good in terms of fitness. So that’s positive.

I’ve been finding that with my “black mambas”(Nike frees) that if I keep to the road my feet get a bit of a hammering and after the run they are sore. So this time I went off-road a lot. This really really helped and my feet were much better after the run. I’ll do that again. Grass and greens are the way to go. I ran around some sort of memorial in the centre of Victoria Park which was cool. I think I’ll do that again. 

I don’t know if I’ve said this before but I’ve substantially reduced my running volume since joining the new Company in the City. The result however is that I do these 10:30 wednesday runs now. So it’s not all bad and in fact it’s a crucial. 

It’s also summer and I’ve reduced my gym hours too. I used to go in the morning but now something about summer has mad me prefer going after work instead. And actually I go less in the gym now which turns out to have had a positive effect on my performance and fitness(and probably my body)

 What I do know is factor about 15mins of cardio in my gym routine these days. I love riding first, then it’s the stair master. Both for 5 mins and then I start the heavy lifting(maybe just heavy to me). I bookend this with cardio, finish the same way I started but additionally I finish with a 5min run, which loosens me out. And that’s how I’m playing it right now. 

Yesterday, I had a leg workout and did this first then proceeded to squats, lunges and jumping lunges(I’m getting good at these). 

Did heavy leg presses but my back started to strain so I switched and did hamstrings. 

I was going to do deadlifts but because I went all out on the leg press, my back wasn’t ready for that. Also, couldn’t do straight-up quads via leg extensions because some dude was bumming on the machine the whole time and it was already at an above 1h workout so I called it in and had a vanilla shake. Probably a good thing. If I don’t stop I’ll just keep going until I don’t know when. 

Tomorrow I’ve got my Wednesday run, which was what this was about and somehow I’ve morphed it into I don’t know what. I’ll probably run it slower but I’ll opt for taking the guys off-road if only to safe my feet and for the sake of variety!

There are various things I like about my new Garmin 235.

It took me a long time to decide to switch from to my Garmin. The foremost being that I have about 3 years’ running metrics stored in Suunto’s Movescount platform and that the Suunto Ambit I have, while outrageously outdated worked really well.

The only thing that broke was the compass and that didn’t irritate me that much. What did start bothering me was the need to remember to carry my heart rate strap with me. So much so that I eventually stopped using and just qualifying that by feeling that pace and time were only important. And this worked for a long time.

Then, I decided to sort that situation out by buying a mio-link Ant+ wrist strap with integrated heart rate monitor. That was grand, I felt I plugged the gap. I did after a while of good use, I’d have to remember to charge it and then I’d have to remember to put it on. Even though it was easier to wear than a heart rate monitor, it felt unnecessary to have it on all the time. It’s didn’t do anything most of the time other than when I was running. So again, I was back to fumbling with things and I’m not a great one for doing that for a long time. I quite like just deciding to go for a run and that’s it.

This ultimately brought me to where I am today. I have a watch that I wear 24/7 and that monitors my steps and heart rate both when I’m running and when I’m not. Finally Fusion.

What I liked about my Ambit was that it was rock-solid. It had wear and tear, it had chips and dents and it didn’t complain. I never worried about it being knocked about. It’s a nice thing to have. One less thing to worry about. It was tough. So despite its age and broken compass and lack of integrated heart rate sens, or it was good. 

The new Garmin is very much smaller, thinner and lighter. That’s a beautiful thing because I notice it and I like it. The other thing is that it’s got beautiful simplicity about it, yet has everything I need, technology wise. I don’t have ABC functionality and I don’t need it. It has more functionality that I need than the ambit had and this deterred me from buying another Ambit like a watch with ‘everything’. I was considering a Garmin Fenix 3/5 but could not justify the features required, extra features and the price tag. The 235 is an above-satisfactory ‘compromise’ between that extreme and what I need. This makes me happy.

It’s important to feel confident that a decision you’ve made is the one you’d go with every time. It’s psychological. 

A very welcome feature is the VO2 max reading it gives you. This is great and built into the screens. I love the fact that it has vibrations, either as alarms or in-flight alerts for pace/hr/distance. Very pleased about that. Al,so a nice change is not needing to ‘plug in’ to sync activities. I can connect the watch via Bluetooth to the phone to do this.

 The inbuilt activity tracker and sleep tracker also really make the whole package that much sweeter and it’s working while I’m not! That’s value for time otherwise not measured. I also like the strap, colour and the font. 

The problem with having all my data in movescount was remedied by initially downloading a python script that fetched it all. Then Suunto also recently added the ability to export all activities too! I then imported it into a central place, namely training peaks and have got both movescount and Garmin Connect sending activities to it. That’s grand.

I’ve also taken time to send my data to other places to evaluate how well they represent my training data. I’ve used trainasone, 2peak and smashrun in addition to training peaks. I used fitness synced to sync my data to these places. Very cool. Am I concerned about my health data here? Possibly but not really. Anyway whether I ultimately buy into these solutions is yet to be seen. I’m currently a free user on training peaks, but I was briefly a premium member until I added duplicates to my account and decided to redo the whole thing, and as a consequence, I redid it as a free user. It’s quite expensive otherwise. £16 a month is eye-watering and I can’t justify that. So free seems fine.

I can’t seem to get my data into Garmin Connect so this will be my base from now on and I’ll sync from Garmin to training peaks as and when I perform activities. This will keep track of my ATL, CTL and TSB scores too. In addition, my watch tells me vo2 max(which incidentally is 59 which is rather high) and Smash-run gives me graphs(though I’m a free user this is sufficient). Don’t think I need trainasone or 2peak accounts as they are geared towards telling me what to do in contrast to showing me what I’ve done - which is more what I want than a coach.

 A good day...

Went for a run, usually these wednesday runs I go with two or three collegues but schedules didn’t match. So I plugged in and went.

According to the stats which I’ve yet to upload from my watch, with only distance and time readable on my watch, my pace was:

That’s 4’33 pace. Boom. My average average pace.

It was tough but manageable. I went all over the show, criss-crossing Victoria park. Beautiful really. I’ll upload my route later when I get home.

Usually, I don’t tend to run this fast over 11km its usually this pace at around 8km so this is faster than usual. its doable though