Shifting Gears

If dirk can run heel first, I guess I can.

I. Half Marathon Goals

II. two hated pharmacy classes combined = Cardio Stats

I. Goals

After experimenting with heel to toe running for a week, I have come to the conclusion that I will be riding this for as long as I can. This also means that my training may possibly have to be trashed halfway in exchange for just getting in mileage, my old way of running.

So 5 minutes ago: Type A personality training and forefoot running

In: Type B personality training and heel to toe

This also means that I need to re-evaluate my goals for the half marathon. I never really said it aloud but in the back of my mind, I really wanted a 1:45 finishing time. Now, I think I will be happy with finishing. Where the older version of Tang would be super mad about doing this, the older and wiser Tang knows this is for the best long term.

II. Fun with Math

I may be the only one on the team who does this but I, every so often, measure my resting heart rate right as I wake up in the AM. You can take it with any ol' device laying around, be it a stop watch, iPod, phone, etc.

Anyways, I was trying to see how much we "save" in terms of my self-coined 'cardio economy'. Googling the average heart rate of a male, I find it to be ~70 bpm. I'm humming at about mid 40s but for the sake of easy math, let's say 50 bpm.

So I save 20 beats per minute, X 60 = 1200 beats per hour.

1200 beats per hour X 24 = 28,800 beats per day.

28,800 beats per day X 365 = 10,512,000 beats per year saved.

But what about running Aaron? That's gotta be more than 50 bpm. So let's say I ran at a max of about 160 bpm while running.

160-70 = 90 yadda yadda yadda...

It would take running 1,946 hours to negate the saved beats. Or 81.1 days continuously. For reference, I'm at 99 hours this year. Although if I ran 81.1 days continuously, I'm sure my heart would be living in the same neighborhood as Lance Armstrong's at 32-34 bpm.

So basically without advanced cardiology and statistics (despite the classes in my degree), I've concluded:

cardio economy

running > not running