Digits: 6/18/16 MAF Test

Here are the results from yesterday’s MAF test:

I finally broke 50 minutes!  I was able to set a 12 second PR yesterday, which I’m incredibly happy with.  It demonstrates that my fitness is slowly increasing as I ramp up my training for ES100.  At least, I think that’s what this means.  When you do these tests, you’re supposed to do them exactly the same, however I changed things up a bit.  Instead of my normal 15 minute warm-up on the track, I walked my dogs for 35 minutes instead.  So my HR starting the workout was about 100bpm instead of right at my target of 142.  Based on how fast the first trip around the track was, this probably benefitted me by 15-20 seconds.  So it’s possible this wasn’t really a PR effort for me.

The flip side is that my HR averaged 1-2bpm lower than it normally does.  I usually have it right at my 142 target and struggle to keep it at or below that level. Yesterday my HR would rise above my target, but it never stayed there long and dropped quickly back below.  I have no idea how much time 1bpm would equate to, but it may be worth 10-20 seconds over 5 miles.  Frankly, it may even be worth more than that.

The only other little screwy thing that happened is that my watch was a bit off on the distance.  There’s not many nice things about running 5 miles around a track, but at least you know where you should be done at.  My watch beeped 5 miles a fair bit short of the full 20 laps.  I kept it running until I reached the point on the track where I started and it ended up being 0.06 miles or about 20 seconds.  I’ve included that “extra” time in my 12 second PR, however didn’t adjust my mile splits above.  The 4th and 5th miles is where it mostly occurred so they should both be about 10 seconds slower.  Still great times for me and I’m quite pleased with the results.  Especially considering the temperature was about 70 degrees so not perfect conditions.