Making Some Progress ...

Today I did the 2-mile loop at Lake Elkhorn in Columbia, Maryland, in what I imagine to be record time for me ... a personal best of 26:16. That computes to 13:08 per mile. I don't think I've ever run a mile that fast. Looking back at times I kept track of in 2000 for running various routes, I find the fastest I recorded then was 1.4 miles at 13:55 per mile.

My heart rate today was in the 150s for the first mile, roughly, and ascended into the 160s for the second, which has many uphill stretches but few if any downhills. It got up to 168 beats per minute at the end. That is still, strictly speaking, "too high," by comparison with my maximum rate of 170. But I wasn't laboring; I wasn't winded. I didn't feel like I was working any harder that I did in making previous, slower circuits of the lake. It felt good.

This came after a Sunday of rest following a Saturday on which I limited my fitness efforts to a brisk half-hour walk.

I'm still experiencing a little bit of lower back pain as a result of Doing Lake Centennial on a Saturday Morn a couple of weeks ago, and putting out too much effort after I had taken too few days off in the immediately preceding time frame. The effort I put out today was on a par with that effort, so I'm waiting to see if the "other shoe drops" in the next day or so, and I develop symptoms of having overdone it.

But the backache isn't as bad, or as constant, as it was. Tentatively, knock on wood, whatever injury I sustained is healing.

Next week, on my doctor's advice, I'm having a cardiologist give me a stress test. I had told Dr. Moore that I consider my heart rates to be too high for the amount of effort I'm expending and for the relatively slow per-mile times I'd been recording. Today's run shows that at least the latter anomaly may be abating.

And that's very, very encouraging. It looks like even "high beaters" like me can increase their aerobic capacity, slowly and steadily, by keeping up the conditioning effort ... even if they are working in a heart-rate zone that is above what the textbooks "officially" recommend.

Tomorrow, I begin the twice-weekly "Basic Fitness" course given by the Department of Recreation & Parks of nearby Howard County.

Interesting note: I read recently in a newspaper article about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that some but by no means all CFS sufferers can increase their energy levels and reduce their fatigue by means of "very gradual increases in aerobic exercise." I don't suffer from CFS, but it looks as if the slender margins between my maximum heart rate and the rates I'm undergoing when I run (say) a 13:08 mile are allowing me to make no more than "very gradual increases" as well.

The moral here seems to be: patience, patience, patience. This is to be a permanent lifestyle change, after all. I want to jog for the rest of my (hopefully, long) life. It doesn't really matter how gradual the buildup is, of necessity, going to be. What matters is that it does seem to be (slowly) having the desired effect. I can run fairly long distances faster than I could before, at the same rate of effort.