Just finished a two hour run in some really nasty conditions. It snowed hard here in the Seattle area for most of the day yesterday. It's amazing how different a little bit of altitude makes. My house is about 150' above sea level, and I got about 5" near my house. Overnight the temperatures went up in to the high-30s and it's been raining hard ever since. I waited until noon hoping that it would melt off, and near my house it looked like it had. My normal route starts off going up even higher and away from Lake Washington - and it was really bad. The slush and snow are bad enough but the ankle-deep puddles of freezing, dirty water are even worse. Fortunately it improved rapidly (except for the rain) as I headed back towards the lake, but was still a slog. I tried to capture the dreary, sloppy mess in the picture above. No matter the weather, Payton always wants to hang out on the deck, and he ran out the door when I went to snap this picture. He's clearly not so happy about it now, but still hasn't decided to come back in.
I'm often surprised by how differently a given activity affects me on a given day. There's been a trend to this over the last few months, that my perception of a hard effort - as measured primarily by heart rate - seems to have shifted up a few beats. Meaning my RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion, or just "how bad does it hurt?") seems to have moved such that I'm comfortable now at a higher intensity than I was prior.
I have very heart-rate focused for the last year or so. Consequently, I did a TON of running at < 140 bpm. Same on the bike. And that became normal such that much of a deviation from that seemed really hard. I knew this was odd - I'd spent years prior training in the 150s a lot of the time. Why did 135 seem hard?
Part of it is that the durations have changed, but there is more to it than that. This has been really driven home for me over the last few weeks where I've done some truly higher-intensity work, but I've seen three basic things happen:
1) I feel awkward running at the heart rates I normally run at. I know I need to be careful about this, but I feel really uncomfortable running in the 130s now. I'm much happier in the low-to-mid 140s.
2) Two weeks ago, I did a 35 minute set at 150-155bpm. It was tolerable, but it felt pretty hard. And it was one of the reasons for me having shaky confidence going into the Seattle Half last week. But there, I made a conscious decision to kind of lay it out there, and ran that race with an Average HR of 162, which means I spent a lot of time in the mid-160s. It was hard, but that was 96 minutes of work. Hmmm - 162 much larger than 135. I'm starting to wonder about the value of some of these gadgets I've accumulated (note it's not uncommon for more experienced athletes to move away from the monitoring because they've developed a good built in scale and don't need them anymore).
3) During the winter, my cycling team does weekly Saturday rides. We break into an A Group and a B Group. Last year, I'd almost always do the B ride (which, honestly, is the right thing for this time of year, but this year I've been riding with my A-Group buddies. Even the A-Ride should be fairly mellow this time of year, but the testosterone still comes out on the climbs. Anyway, what I've noticed is a HUGE difference in what I'm able to do on the days that I decide I'm going to ride hard versus the days I decide I'm going to hang back a bit. The numbers are different in the two cases, and on the days that I don't want to really go at it, it hurts a whole lot more. The RPE is higher at a given output, no question about it.
The point is that it's easy to underestimate how much your brain has to do with everything. Things that seem to be inflexible or factual or objective, often aren't. Our attitudes, beliefs, and biases have a tremendous ability to color our perceptions in ways that are difficult to separate out from factual limits.
I think we were all supposed to get this from The Little Engine That Could. I just needed a referesher.