Okay. That went better.

Had a long talk with Lucho this morning about last night's blow up and a few other things.  He nailed the low heart rate/high exertion/low output problem right off the bat.  Then we talked about why I am feeling like crap all the time... well, most of the time and why running just doesn't feel easy to me anymore. 

Duh... it's the bike and apparently I don't give it enough credit (and respect) for how much it takes out of me. So that more or less solved problem number two....

We left the call with me having two options for today's run.  I could either do today's run as planned or I could try to do last nights run if it felt like it could happen.  Of course I didn't know how that would play out until I went to run.

Seeing that I had upped my carb input considerably last night out of frustration, and I was eating a lot more today as well, it seemed like I was going into today's run better fueled than yesterday.   And yesterday I apparently did not eat as much as I had thought during the day and that played into things last night too.

So I started the run and after the HRM finally settled in around mile one, it still felt like my heart rate was depressed and that I was going WAY too fast for the 136'ish bpm that I was getting.  But since I wasn't feeling that bad I decided to hang on for another mile and see how it played out.  By the end of mile two, things still felt off but I was comfortable so I decided to go for it, another stab at last night's botched run.

The goal then became to hold my heart rate above 140 avg for the first five miles, then over 150 for the next three and if at all possible over 160 for the last two.   I figured if things were going well, it would work out, if not, the last two miles wouldn't be happening at all so it was a rather binary proposition.

For the most part it all worked out just fine.  I averaged 142 bpm for the first five, 154 for the next three and then 162 for the last two. I completed the ten mile run in 1:20:53 and felt okay afterwards even.

The run still wasn't that easy and I still feel like things are still sort of off but it is nice to know why and to have a possible explanation for it and to also know why things feel so much different than I am used to. 

And thus ends January... 292 miles of cycling and 160 miles of running, or 29 hours 15 minutes of cycling and 29 hours and 30 minutes of running.