Virtue is its own reward#

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:52:22 +0000

If true, this is not good news, because after the "my gosh, aren't I good" effect of having got up early to do intervals in Victoria Park before work wore off (about lunchtime), I'm left with the realisation that the speeds I reached over 500m probably wouldn't even get me into cat 3 and frankly I'd like a little more reward than that. On the other hand, if my MaxHR is around 188 (let's assume 220-age despite its general inapplicability, given a lack of any better figure) it doesn't look as though I was trying too hard either. Whatever it is that's limiting my sprint speed[1], it's not cardio.

Images brought to you using a convoluted combination of gpsbabel and gnuplot:

The good news, if there is good news, is that I'm actually swinging both arms and it feels natural. Some more care and attention needed to swing them in directions that don't make me look like a gorilla, but that's just practice.

fn1. If I'm looking for excuses then I'll blame the surfaces in Victoria Park, which are on the whole not unlike the manky three quarters of Battersea Park, and/or doing the whole thing before eating breakfast. But it's more likely actually that I'm in too high a gear and should be toeing out a bit more.

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Paul Makepeace wrote:
> Pity you don't have real comments on your quasi-blog.
Yes, it's on my list to do something about when I get bored of playing
with SVG and DOM.  The number of comments has definitely dropped (to,
er, 1) since I moved from blogspot.
> Anyway, that graph might be quite interesting plotted as a scatter
> graph with speed against heart rate, see where the "knee" in the curve
> is and find your anaerobic point.
Conconi style?  I bunged the data into gnuplot, but there's so little
of it (many of the points below about 25km/h are GPS noise or from
deceleration during the "rest" interval) and so much noise by
comparison that if I squint hard enough I think can make it say
anything I feel like.
Nice idea, though, and one to try with a data from a slightly
steadier-paced workout.

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