Those triathletes are admirable. They jump off their bikes, the shoes still sticking to the pedals, slip in their running shoes and off they go onto the running leg. The rythm switches on the first 500m. It took me 21km.
After the bike tour, I took a two day time-out to rest the legs and thought to get the biking rythm out of the system. One main reason why it’s hard to run after biking is that the brain and nerv system needs to adjust to the quite different patterns of neuromuscular coordination needed for running. The legs feel as if they’d carry lead, you lean forward to speed up but the same time you recognize that this effort can’t last long. Overall, everything’s too slow.
I deliberatly chose a slow pace, 5min/km, at the beginning of the first run and thought to get the legs freed of that lead and get back to normal (around 4:20 - 4:30min/km) later in the run. Never got there, not on this first run. 5min/km that was it, through all the 21km. Had a hell of a hurry to get showered and changed afterwards, since the calculations in squeezing this run in between two meetings at work went awfully wrong.
Other observations now a couple of training sessions later. Speed has gone and the heart rate doesn’t exceed 85% of the maximum heart rate. The former is somewhat related to the different neuromuscular coordination when biking. The constantly pedalled 80 - 100 rotations per minute are so different from carrying your own body wheight with an explosive stride. A session of short intervals (400’s) and fartlek with short efforts should get us back. The latter is interesting. I do assume this stems from the lower heart rate on the bike as well. But the question is how to get back to normal on this front. The first weeks of marathon training aim at ramping up kilometers to establish a high endurance base. Those are also more lower heart rate workouts. But without getting the heart beat up to 180, it’s difficult to do 1000m intervals in 3:20min.
Tags: bike tour
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