Thursday, February 5, 2009

Becoming a 5am runner

Today I went for a 7km run at 5am in the morning. Did my View Road loop route. 6.98km / 32:33 / 4:40 min/km and that was a comfortable pace.

I usually watch how I'm breathing on a run and how I feel immediately afterwards although have been thinking about getting a heart rate monitor and being a bit more scientific about it. Any recommendations?

On reflection there are number of clear advantages of early morning running:

- it's not too hot
- hardly any cars so intersections less of an issue, also air quality is a lot better along main roads
- pretty quiet, along the suburban streets in Mt Eden hear you can hear the birds waking up which is nice
- a great start to the day with the reward of a shower and breakfast when you get home.

Now in answer to a couple of questions on my last post:

Yep I'll probably will do round the bays this year just for the experience of being in such a big iconic fun run. I've actually never run it although I have heard it is pretty hard to race it because of so many people.

In terms of running with a water bottle or fuel belt actually no I've haven't done this. Probably my longer runs suffer accordingly. I have started doing a few runs where I know there are water taps available. For instance in Auckland viaduct harbour there is a water fountain directly east of the intersection of Gaunt and Haslett Street. There is another in One Tree Hill near the kids playgound.

3 comments:

Andrew(ajh) said...

That's one advantage of riding a bike, easier to carry water!

Andrew is getting fit said...

I've been running with a Camelbak lately. Much better than the bottles.

Get a Garmin GPS watch. ;)

said...

Hi, I come from Hong Kong. I used to wear heart monitor for jogging or racing before. It's very useful for controlling your pace and monitoring your body status not to run in overloading. It makes you easily to determine your threshold of speed and distance. And you can record down your heart beat and lap time every day for comparing with prior records.

Cheers~ sorry for bad English :P