“By The Numbers, People”: Wildlife, Running
This morning I set out to do a really thrilling & exciting training session - NOT! Maybe I’m just enjoying cycling & swimming too much, but just now running is kinda a chore. Still, at least this morning I was on a MISSION:
1. Measure my lactate threshold as per Bill’s instructions.
2. Measure my sweat rate - a guaranteed way to make me attractive. Or something like that.
So at 0830 I set off for Pouzolles, with the intention of clocking about 7-8km via the return shortcut via L’Abbaye de Cassan. Before setting off, I’d weighed myself five times on the wobbly bathroom scales, & taken an average (72.5kg, apparently) to allow for their poor R&R.
Ten minutes in, I pressed the reset on my cheep HRM (& I mean cheep - not inexpensive, good value, or any other kind of side-stepping), & pressed the metaphorical pedal to the metal for a further 20 minutes. During this time, I averaged 163bpm.
While doing this, it seemed that the local wildlife was out to play. I saw . . . a koipu (South American water vermin thing - looks like a cross between a beaver and a rat) . . . a hare, and a fairly large snake that’d just failed it’s Green Cross Code test. I’m from the UK, where we don’t relly have snakes (the occasional shy and easily identified adder excepted), so I gave this a wide berth! Oh, and you just wouldn’t believe the size and variety of butterflies around.
Anyway, all this wildlife spotting must have got me distracted, because I missed the turning for the shortcut home, and ended up going all the way into Roujan. By the time I got back to base, the stopwatch was reading 58:30, and I think I’d done somewhere between 11 & 12km - maybe more, as the middle section was pretty hard.
Desperate for a drink, I weighed myself again, and found I’d lost about 1.1kg (about 2.5 lb). So now I know how much I need to drink in these conditions (32C in the sun / approx 26 in the shade) just to keep on an even keel. That’s 1 litre of water per hour!
More on this later, as I’m sure that ambient air temperature has an effect, and there’s bound to be somewhere on the internet that’ll allow me to use some sort of graph to see how more extreme conditions are likely to pan out.
