Sunday, September 18, 2011

How far can I run in 1 hour?


I fancied doing the running equivalent of the cycling Hour record, having recently run 7.77 hilly miles within an hour at work.

I didn't do any exercise the day before. I had 2 slices of toast and a proper coffee for breakfast, and set out at 08:51 in intermittent light rain - not bad conditions for running really.

I also had another goal: sub-45 for 10k, which is 7:14.5 min/mile pace, although I hadn't calculated the required pace accurately before I set off.

There's not much to say about the first part of the run. I was fairly lucky with traffic - I didn't have to stop for anything.  The first half mile is downhill which gave me a free head start on my required pace. I just had to hold on to enough of it.

10k arrived after about 44:52 - 7:13 pace. I checked the elapsed time as soon as the distance hit 6.22m, which I thought was just shy of 10k, but actually 10/1.6093 = 6.2139 so at 6.22 I was already past 10k. Woot.

But part of making sure I got 10k sub-45 involved pushing for the last 0.5 miles, raising my heart rate to 182 which is past my aerobic threshold. I was tempted to abort the Hour effort, but figured I'd just ease off a bit so that I could recover.

It took 0.23 miles for my heart rate to come back down to 171, a little lower than I should have let it drop to. My average pace for the recovery section was 8:01, then I picked up the pace again.

With 13:20 to go until the hour arrived, I was happy to work at a decent rate but didn't fancy flogging myself. Over the final section I averaged 7:31 pace, heart rate 175bpm, 1.78 miles.

I was keeping an eye on the watch, but I didn't notice that the hour was nearly up until I had only 15 seconds to go, so I didn't have much time to gain some extra distance in a sprint finish.

Once 1:00:00 arrived on the watch I stopped to catch my breath, reset the watch, and jogged home really slowly as a warm down.

Distance in 1 hour: 8.21 miles.

Re: gradient, the elevation at the start is about 45 metres, and about 15 metres at end, so the net gradient is about 0.23% downhill.

2 comments:

Russell Finn said...

I did the 1 hour thing again on November 20th 2011, covering 8.31 miles in the hour, 7:14 average pace.

Russell Finn said...

I'm 2016 I ran a whole marathon (26.2 miles) at the improved pace of 7:14/mile for the 8.31 miles run in the previoisxcommemt