Found a Fiver , Breakneck Speed and a Couple of Runs

On Sunday I ran a green zone run. No I am not living in a war zone simply using the Adidas mi coach. A green zone run is a medium effort which extends your endurance and optimally burns calories. You'll also build a greater cardiovascular capacity - or foundation - to push harder in later stages and more intense zones.

Heart rate based training helps you:

• Know Your Body Better: When you train consistently, you'll learn how your body responds to exercise.
• Track Your Progress: As your fitness improves, you'll be able to handle harder runs.
• Pick Up the Pace: mi Coach lets you measure your pace against your Heart Rate and, as you improve, you'll be able to run longer and faster at the same heart rate as you were (at a lower intensity) a few months back.

Least that's what the official blurb from the Adidas site tells me.

After a 5 minute jog in the blue zone I then ran 40 minutes at a steady green zone pace followed by a 5 minute warm down jog. I managed to run for 79% of the time at the green zone pace. However the rest of the time I ran too quickly and this is when the mi coach steps in and my friendly coach interrupts my ipod playing songs from Tokyo Police Club to tell me to slow down.

In short what I am finding is that I have tended to run a lot of my training runs at too fast a pace probably leading to injury. Much of the time my training has been at a green zone pace and I am struggling to run at the slower blue pace which does feel a bit like a crawl .Blue zone  is an easy effort builds your aerobic base and improves recovery. It also allows you to put forth a greater effort in the higher intensity zones to get more out of your running. 

It feels alien and almost embarrassing to run at such a slow pace but I am going to stick with as a radical new form of training. After all I have been injured for a lot of the last year and this is worth a try.

Directly after my run which was just over 5 miles I felt fit enough to visit Nowton Park and we did a 2 mile walk around the circumference following the yellow route path. Almost immediately on starting the walk I found a fiver! A stroke of luck and not the first time I have done this at Nowton Park. 

On a previous walk around here I found a tenner. What is it about Nowton Park that encourages folks to empty their pockets of cash? Might be the thought of the ice cream van at the car park or the haste to get back to the car when they get the car keys out.  Still not complaining, I just need to visit Nowton Park more often to reap the rewards that are there to be found. Why go the beach and metal detect when you can go to Nowton Park and pick up free money after all it grows on trees. Well at least it does at Nowton Park.

An element of me feels guilty for picking it up but if I didn't someone else would and once dropped how would you know who was the rightful owner.


On Monday I did a very easy 30 minute jog at a very easy pace. So far so good with the easy pace running.  Certainly not Breakneck Speed

David Monks -  Photo from the recent Latitude Festival where Tokyo Police Club played. Now on tour in USA and Canada promoting their new album Champ.