Up a hill

There has been a slight, but only a slight improvement in the weather today, in that it has almost stopped raining. The wintery cold is still with us but the forecast is for that to be replaced by something resembling Spring warmth during the coming week. Oh, I hope so!

So anyway, this afternoon while Andy was doing more work on the stair treads and working on the hole in the ceiling into which the woodburner conduit disappears into the chimney, the pooch and I headed out for a beasting on the Peguère road. The road up to the Col de Peguère is 3.42 kms long with 400m of ascent, an average gradient of 12% - good hill training territory! I am determined to run it without stopping one of these days. However, that day is not yet here. So, I warmed up on the first 1km which is the steepest section (it reaches 18% at one point - aagh!), striding briskly for 12 minutes to get the legs and lungs working. It was there that I noticed a problem with my heart rate monitor which suddenly warned me that my heart rate was over the max!!! Whaaaaat!! Fortunately, it was because my chest strap was slipping and the rate soon returned to 'normal' when I adjusted it. I then ran for 2 minutes, walked for a minute, ran for 4 minutes, walked for a minute and then was able to run for 9 minutes before walking for another minute to gear up for the final 3 min 50 sec/0.5km blast to the top. It had taken me 33 mins. I was pleased with that. I was all the more pleased because my heart rate was around 86% of my max whilst I was 'running' and I seemed able to sustain that pace for longer than I had thought possible. On the final half a kilometer I pushed up to 90% of my max but I could not sustain that pace for much longer! So it was a useful training session and good to see just how my fitness on the hills is coming along. Full stats are here just in case you could be vaguely interested - the heart rate section shows where the monitor 'blipped' on the initial stage.