Free Your Ears And Your Run Will Follow

My (wife’s) iPod crashed last week...right before a workout.  It wasn't a ‘good news, bad news’ situation.  It was more like a ‘good news, bad news, really bad news’ thing. 

Good news:  I had many of my favorite music files tucked away in my smart phone. 

Bad news:  The iPod required a reset to factory specifications.

Really bad news:  My computer was stolen a couple of weeks back; not only did I lose three years’ worth of training data, blog posts, articles, research and photos, but nearly two thousand MP3 files and podcasts, which were not in my iTunes account.  Thus, many of my favorite songs in that “sweet spot” tempo of 80-to-90 beats per minute would either need to be reinstalled from source CDs, or were gone forever.

I’ve written on many occasions how fickle technology can be toward the running athlete.  The more dependent we become on the technology to tell us what we think we need to know, or to make us happy during the run, the more earth-shattering it seems when everything “goes south.” 

My views on using personal music players vary from ambivalence and pragmatism to pity, depending on the shirt I’m wearing at the moment:

If I’m in running attire at a race the view is closer to ambivalence.

If I’m in a red or zebra-striped polo shirt I’m busy reaching for my notepad.  (My friends know what I mean.) 

I don’t run on the roads with a music player, but I’ll sing to myself when I run outside.  I tell my wife, for much the same reason I train on a treadmill, I want to control as many of the variables as possible.

One of the reasons people run with a music player is to dissociate, or to drown out the “stop already” messages the muscles, lungs and heart send to the brain throughout the course of a race.  Other runners use music players to reinforce run tempo (one reason they are prohibited in triathlon).  But there’s more that happens between the ears and the earphones of the individual runner when music is involved.

We have an internal clock which controls how well we move in the forward direction; run rhythm, stride length, run speed, and so on.  When fatigue sets in we need to grasp for some sort of cue to align with the “clock” in our head and normalize ourselves: music, lines in the road/on the track, telephone poles, etc.  The tempo of the music in the player may…or may not…be aligned with the "right" tempo for the individual runner.  Unless you’re a complete obsessive-compulsive it is highly unlikely your music is set aside in beat-per-minute playlists.  (In the interest of public disclosure, I do notate my BPM on my tracks.) 

That most likely means you are thinking more about what’s going into your head than what you’re putting out via your legs.

Do you sing in the shower?  Do you sing while cooking? Or folding clothes? 

And if you do, do you ALWAYS sing at the EXACT tempo at which the song was performed?

If you answered ‘no’ to the last question you may not need a music player to improve your running.  You can most likely sing your way to a better run performance.

Satoh and Kuzuhara (2008) assessed the time and steps of subjects walking along straight and curved paths while mentally singing a familiar song.  They were asked to listen to the song, clap hands while listening, sing the song, clap while singing the song, sing while walking in place, walk while singing, then walk while singing to themselves.  Analysis of the gait (degree of arm swing, the height of the knees and the smoothness of turn) was performed by a trained observer.

The patients reported feeling improvements in foot progression, ease of arm swing, knee raise and turning and fixation of walking speed. Qualitative evaluation of walking indicated higher knee lift, larger arm swings, smoother turns and less inconsistency in gait.  There was a significant improvement in the time and steps while walking a straight path and turning.  The researchers believed improvement would be more dramatic in the event of worse gait disturbance.  The study participants were able to use mental singing to recover normal pacing when pace was disturbed.

Athletes who moderate their run mechanics by the use of music will most likely benefit from simply singing to themselves during the run rather than placing their safety at risk by using a music player.

Suck It Up, Buttercup?

"Things are seldom what they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream; Highlows pass as patent leathers; Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers..." 'Buttercup' in "HMS Pinafore" (Gilbert & Sullivan)

We athletes are a picky lot.  We'll travel hundreds of miles to a destination race even when a good event is in our backyard.  We pay loads of our hard-earned money to register, spend much of our limited leisure time to prepare...  We show up on the day, nervous and prepared to get the event over with, and more often than not, hope the race director has exerted due diligence. 

Usually they have.  There are great events, well-prepared and well-staffed, which leave nothing to chance.

Unfortunately there are still people in the endurance sport world that fail to leave nothing to chance.  In some cases it's not necessarily because of malevolence (by far the worst reason) or ignorance (the next-worst).  Race director certification courses promulgated by national governing bodies and associations have remedied a majority of the knowledge shortfalls, and stronger sanction processes are weeding out the greed-mongers.

But I still worry about the "cut-and-paste" persons.  Those are the folks mean well but are willing to let quality slide a little here and a little there.  Just a little.  Rather than take the extra thirty minutes to complete a particular form from scratch they'll cut-and-paste the information from the previous years' event into the approval forms for the next edition. 

I've been just as guilty, especially in my real work.

And, rather than exercise due diligence and take a closer look to see if things have changed, the reviewer (who sometimes also need to be checked) places their stamp of approval and moves it forward along the chain of custody. 

Next thing you know, an athlete who did wrongly use performance-enhancing drugs but gets off on a technicality.  Or an athlete is seriously injured or dies because what was on the paperwork was not what was happening in real life.  Those are some profoundly hard situations.  What about something a little less life-altering, like something agreed upon doesn't get done.

If it adversely affects you what do you do?  Do you suck it up and drive on?  Do you try to get to the bottom and make certain, to borrow from one of my favorite rock and roll tunes you "don't get fooled again?"

I guess if it was only me I'd suck it up.  Actually, no.  It it affects my reputation I wouldn't let the issue go.

So there.

Doing Business That Makes Me Smile

“…So why didn’t you run the race this morning?”

Barb, my friend, posted this message on my Facebook wall, which I read minutes after coming home from a two-hour trail trek. Since the questioner is a close friend, dignifying the query with an answer was almost mandatory. “I had a commitment which had to be honored. Suzanne’s not here to support me. Besides that, I’m not in racing shape.”

Barb’s response came back while I was cleaning up: “You could have run the 5K.”

“No. I could not. What needed to be done, needed to be done at 9:00. Besides, I don’t race unless I feel ready to race.”

One of the things an overuse injury does, once a runner can run again, is encourage a focus on quality. Junk mileage, miles for mileage sake, miles to impress ones’ fellow runners; all that egomania gets kicked to the curb. Quality workouts come to the fore. Rest and recovery become important. Races transform into as much of a celebratory event as a test of heart.

After fifty-plus weeks of progress from no running, to twenty minutes, thirty, forty-five, and right at the edge of sixty minutes five or six times a week, I HAVE to keep running fun.

I recently downloaded a copy of Christopher McDougall’s 2009 book, “Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen,” for a number of reasons. I’ve slammed barefoot running as a sort of snake oil fix, and I wanted to read straight from the source material many barefoot running enthusiasts cite as their inspiration. (My suspicion is many barefoot zealots choose to go buffet-style rather than accept the entire menu.) But before I use the broad brush to paint a Picasso-like mural of barefoot true believers, I figured I’d hear the man out. As Bob Dylan once sang: “…don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”

I read through the first hundred pages or so without difficulty. Reading “Born To Run” probably won’t fill you with the compulsion to throw out your Asics Cumulus altogether, or replace them with a pair of Fila Skele-Toes.

Or perhaps it might.

But it’s a very fun read into the mindset of a couple of cultures so different from our own, that of the Tarahumara of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, and that of the ultra-runner.

So, why do people run barefoot? Why do they run ultras? Why do my grandkids love to run and play? What caught my attention in the first hundred pages or so is McDougall’s discussion of famed distance running coach Joe Vigil’s observations of the Tarahumara during the Leadville 100 trail ultramarathon in the 1990s:

“…the real secret of the Tarahumara…(they) remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation….perfecting the art of combining…breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.…You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love—everything we sentimentally call our "passions" and "desires"—it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.”

If nothing else, what I’ve learned so far from McDougall, from Vigil, from the Tarahumara - and from the guys who spend their Saturday mornings on the wooded trails, miles from the nearest 5K road race, is that running is art. Stephen Stills sang, “I don’t do business that don’t make me smile.” While I understand there are many of my friends who are driven by the pursuit of beer glasses and applause of companions, but if “breath and mind and muscles in fluid self-propulsion” doesn’t bring a smile to our face, we might as well forego the application paperwork and the cotton t-shirt and hand our $25 to the beer vendor.

If it isn’t fun, why do it?

Twenty Minutes To (More) Speed - Tempo Runs

Everyone has seen this runner: They toe the line at the local 5,000-meter race, go out at 6:30 pace for the first mile, subsequently slowing down to 7:30 pace on the third one. When you approach their gasping form as they hang onto a signpost, they tell you, 'I could have raced this one, but this was only a tempo run.'

Oh? Really?

When I coached weekly workouts it was my "job" to provide training which worked as many energy systems as possible.

(ED. COMMENT: My coach reminded me we used to do tempo runs as part of the group's training, for which he is correct...a few things changed some over the course of a few years...sometimes change does not always move toward the more beneficial.)

One day a week we did a lot of aerobic-to-threshold-pace stuff at a short (one-to-two-minute) duration. The second workout of the week consisted of efforts lasting anywhere from two-to-five minutes. Several members of the training group liked the longer repeats a great deal. But it was difficult to encourage tempo running as a solo workout outside of training sessions.

I didn't run regular tempo workouts, either. Yes, there were the occasional "anti-social" Wednesday evening beach runs, where I'd go out at a low-seven-minute pace for as long as my lungs could stand, then push a little harder for the last three miles. But it wasn't until I became treadmill-bound and more-closely focused on my own training I started to look a little more closely at the tempo run.

Most recreational runners don't like tempo running; I'm not certain if it is because they don't know what pace to run, they think tempo runs are too painful, or they'd much rather socialize during their runs. But I can tell you they're missing out on some free speed at a low (time) cost-to-(speed) benefit ratio.

First, let's look at what constitutes a tempo run. Dr. Jack Daniels, in "Running Formula," says that (ideally) twenty (to-thirty) minutes of steady running at threshold pace is a tempo run. That's twenty minutes of steady running at an effort level where our body uses the lactate as fast as it is produced from carbohydrate metabolism during physical exercise.

For example, a person who runs a 21-minute 5,000-meters would - according to Daniels - run tempo runs at about 7:10/mile pace (for those who speak treadmill, that's about 8.4 mph). If you still don't have a copy of "Running Formula," never fear. Take your 5,000-meter race pace per mile and add 25-30 seconds.

Are tempo runs painful? I will say they are no easy, breezy walk in the park. After running my first tempo run in about a year - and my first tempo run on a treadmill - my average heart rate was about five beats higher across the board, and my max heart rate near the end was just shy of 85 percent of maximum. For those runners who prefer to not inflict twenty minutes of "comfortably hard" effort on themselves, Daniels recommends what he calls "cruise intervals" of one-mile or ten-minutes, broken up with 30-to-60-seconds of recovery.

Another challenge of tempo running comes from having the right course. The right circuit or course can make all the difference. If your favorite training stretch - for example, from the hotel where Suzanne and I like to stay to Audubon Park and back - has a lot of intersections and traffic, it's easier for me to run "cruise intervals." A good, lightly-trafficked and distance-marked loop or bike path, like the 4.25-mile or 5.8-mile loops on Pensacola Beach, are good for tempo work. Levees and rails-to-trails are also good.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be a solitary affair. Social runners who are at or near the same ability level can work together and ensure the run tempo does not slack off.

Tempo work is probably one of the most under-appreciated, and under-used, workouts which are available to the self-coached runner. The only things necessary for longer-distance speed gains are to know the proper pace, set aside twenty quality minutes, and keep pushing the entire piece.

The Courage to Change, The Wisdom to Know

I looked at the runner's watch face, moments after he finished his marathon. He made his goal of under three hours. But to me something felt very wrong.

Late-December clouds, drizzle, and mist might have affected the ability of his Garmin 310XT (the same model I use to measure, train and race) to communicate clearly with the constellation of satellites; it's happened in the past.

Chuck depended on the 310XT for feedback and pace guidance because he was running solo, without benefit of escort vehicle or bicycle on which to gauge his effort. He told me he tried to do the mathematics throughout the run in order to figure out whether he'd make his goal of seven sub-three-hour marathons in seven days. I could see he was not confident of repeating the feat over the next six days, not without accurate feedback outside of his own physiological data.

I drove home and began to walk through the interrogation points I normally give to a GPS user after a race on a course I've measured:

Was he at the exact start line when the horn went off? Yes.

Did he run the shortest possible distance for the entire run? Outside of six-to-eight stops at the outside edge of the track for fluids, he "bloodhounded" the inside lane line.

Did he stop his unit at the exact finish? Most likely; at the worst he stopped it no more than ten meters past the finish mark.

The issue wasn't that his GPS unit registered a distance that was longer than the standard marathon of 26.21876 miles, or 42.195 kilometers. I knew that was going to happen. It was that the GPS unit registered a distance that was much longer than the standard marathon.

An error rate that approaches five percent definitely exceeds my comfort zone. At that point all I could do is start interrogating myself. I've made a mistake, but WHERE?

Maybe on the mathematical calculations? I've been caught with bad calculations in the past, which can cost a day to two days' worth of work, depending on the race distance. I used to use a hand calculator and word processing document in the past to complete my measurement paperwork but quickly learned the joy of Excel spreadsheets. Once you develop a good spreadsheet formula the paperwork turns into "plug and play."

Also, I've had the pleasure of a second measurer in the past two months, as well as the course certifier, looking at my calculations.

The only thing left was to take a look at my calibration. When I first planned the job I was going to do it in kilometers rather than miles; the track was a 400-meter track, so 42.195 was (so I thought!) going to be more simple than doing feet and miles.

Boy, was I wrong.

Back home, I chewed hard on the data, even going out to take a look at my calibration course. It took only an hour of walking up and down the way for me to realize how badly I screwed up.

I punched up the correct data, went back to speak with the race director, and told her I owed Chuck an apology. She understood it was an integrity issue; it took courage to come out and admit the mistake and to fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible. And I guess she was right. I could have let ego, arrogance and even fear force me to keep my mouth shut.

Small-scale misjudgments - whether as a measurer, a coach, or as a runner - may not drastically affect short-distance races, but can be disastrous when it comes to races like the marathon. Think very carefully about all of the training details, because it's the small one that's most likely going to be the most costly.

All Stressed Up And Nowhere To Go

Ever have one of those mornings when you didn't feel like getting out of bed for the morning run? You talk yourself out of bed and into the morning pre-run ritual. You might even muffle the little voice in your head long enough to step out the door. Maybe you get a mile up the road before SOMETHING finally clicks in your head and you receive the urgent message. You know the one:

What. Are. You. Thinking?

There are mornings, sometimes days, when our body tries to inform us it hasn't completely recovered from the stress of days past, which may or may not include our training. A heart rate monitor is an inexpensive tool to determine or predict whether we've endured a little too much stress.

I've used a heart rate monitor as part of my training for the past six or seven years. It's a simple tool to figure out your resting heart rate first thing in the morning. Some folks like to use the monitor to maintain their run pace. The heart rate monitor can also be used to help quantify a workout effort.

An athlete's resting heart rate can show the progression of fitness, as well as the onset of overreaching (not so good) or overtraining (not good at all). Some will place the heart rate strap when they go to bed, then turn on the heart rate receiver for a minute after waking up. Once the athlete learns their average heart rate, those mornings when sudden spikes of five-or-more beats-per-minute are read can tell the athlete about residual stress, or that the body has not completely recovered.

A resting heart rate can also be checked just as easily by placing a finger on the carotid artery and counting the pulses for a minute, but machines are more likely to be honest than human beings about the numbers.

I know folks who like to pace their runs based on a target heart rate zone. I prefer to go by feel than by heart rate for a number of reasons:

First, the heart is a demand pump. The oxygenated blood is sent to the places the body informs the brain it is most needed. That means there's a lag time between an effort is performed by the muscles and when the blood arrives to replenish the muscles...kind of the reverse of the way our automobile's carburetor works.

Second, depending on hydration (or dehydration), weather conditions, fitness, etc., a particular pace effort can vary in heart rate. A six-minute-per-mile pace is not always going to equate to a 145 beat-per-minute rate, just to give an example.

Ever ask someone how difficult a particular workout was? How do they usually describe it?

Dr. Eric Bannister researched training impact, scoring by percentage of maximum heart rate, multiplied by duration. Each ten percent above the fiftieth percentile earns a single point for each minute of effort. So a sixty-minute run at fifty percent of max heart rate would be a training impact score of sixty. That same sixty minutes at sixty percent max heart rate would score 120, a 180 training impact score would be seventy percent max for sixty minutes, and so on. Most good heart rate monitors have a function which informs the user how long their effort was in a particular range, or provides the average heart rate for the workout period.

Bannister and others also researched whether the Borg (perceived effort) scale of one-to-ten could be used to score training stress. They found most experienced athletes scored their perceived effort almost as accurately without a heart rate monitor; an athlete who scored their workout as a six-out-of-ten was found to have had exercised at around sixty percent of maximal heart rate. So you don't necessarily have to use a heart rate monitor, but you can get deeper into the details with one on your wrist/chest.

Once the workout is scored, the question soon follows as to what that score means to the individual.

Hunter Allen, one of the developers of the Training Peaks workout software, in a recent article, correlated training stress scores to levels of stress and need for recovery. He wrote that scores of:

- less than 150 = low stress. Recovery from this effort is generally complete by the following day.

- 150-to-300 = medium stress. Some residual fatigue. Generally complete recovery by the second day after the workout.

- 300-to-450 = high stress. Residual fatigue remains even after two days.

- more than 450 = very high stress. Residual fatigue over the next several days is likely.

While it's important to know how hard we run or work out, it's more important to realize gains in strength, speed, endurance and overall fitness come as we allow our body to properly recover from the effort. Once we completely recover we can go out and repeat the stress again, which makes our body more resistant to that same level of stress.

Temperature Rising

I hold the faint, fleeting hope that winter has completed its onslaught here. All right, before those of you who live in more arctic climes laugh derisively at my wimpiness, I will honestly admit two things:
First - twenty-plus years of living in Florida has thinned my blood to the consistency of a Pat O'Brien's Hurricane.
Second - I've probably thrown out every piece of true winter-weight clothing suitable for wearing to work or running.

If I lived in Chicago, or worked at Great Lakes it would be necessary to have good stuff. Yes, that leather bomber jacket was barely functional without a sweater/vest underneath. Seriously microwaved cup of coffee makes a good handwarmer...for a time.

However, it's 60-something degrees this morning, and I hope it will stay like this for at least a few days. It makes everything a little more tolerable; the walk from the car to the pool at 5:30 for swim workouts, the walk from the car to the office for work, even the evening track workout. When the local university is on spring break like it was last week - okay, what school decides to place it's spring break period in the beginning of February? I digress again. Everything was shut down, minimally-lit & barren. Makes it difficult to keep motivated, & that doesn't include the issue of the bathrooms.

We were leaving our workout as a friend, an ex-university cross-country coach/national-class marathoner was coming in to get his workout. How shocking to hear he hadn't run more than a dozen miles a week since the beginning of the year, but his focus has been on academics. I bet his 12 quality miles were more effective than my 40-50 junk miles...junk being a relative term.

Don't know if he could run a marathon, or a half-marathon on 12 miles a week. I know I probably couldn't. Heck, I'd think twice about marathoning on 40-to-50 a week. Maybe I could do it, but it would probably be ugly like an ape.

It's not just a question of quantity, but also of quality, when you're talking about mileage. I'm a firm believer in cross-training to maintain aerobic fitness. It's not running, but you can get the heart rate up without taking the pounding the equivalent running miles would produce. I haven't figured out the proper blend of cross training-to-easy running-to-to hard running yet, but I'm working it. Probably, like most everything else in life, it varies from person to person.

What works for me doesn't always work for the athletes I coach. But it's usually a good range.

Another Year on the Job

...okay, so there are worse jobs. Actually, I saw something posted on the work area of one of the training division's officers that made my job seem pretty good in comparison. While not one of those Discovery Channel, Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs, definitely food for thought: I guess every one of Johnson & Johnson's rectal thermometers are tested and inspected to determine they are of the highest quality. How would you like to be the person who works in rectal thermometer quality control? Oh, I heard this song and dance before...and so have many coaches. Didn't Jack Daniels call these kind of athletes coach frustrators? Actually, I'm blessed to have motivated athletes - most of them are exceeding my expectations, almost all of the rest are meeting them.

I think everyone has at least one or two athletes who prefer not to (or choose not to) tap into those deep wells of desire, and there's only so much a coach can do for them. With those athletes, it's maintenance of the fun factor that's most important. They don't really want leadership, just a lack of bother. Today marks my fourth anniversary as a married man, and the beginning of my third year as a coach. Yep, that means the warranties on both counts have expired and I can't be returned to the manufacturer for replacement.

Both have been learning experiences. Both have humbled me and shown me (regularly) the limits of my knowledge, my patience...and the worth of continuous improvement. So, thank you, Suzanne, for not deciding to trade me in on two twenty-something guys. Thank you, ECRT, for not (as a whole) resorting to on-line coaching. This always happens to me, especially on the weekend. After a while a guy can get a little cranky about any phone call. I had a couple of beer mile participants comment about my flat affect on the phone, to which I responded, 'well, if you had as many (stoopid) phone calls as I've had, you would have a flat affect, too.' I always thought (otherwise rational) adults were capable of reading instructions and following directions. I've learned otherwise in the past year. However, I keep holding out hope...maybe they will once I do. Gee, you think? Last month of training and racing for the locals before the weather gets too awful...and they go into the Florida version of hibernation: Tuesday night music on the beach, Thursday night music downtown, Saturday or Sunday out on the water in the boat (for those who have boats). Since most of my folks are training with an eye toward a couple of triathlons in May/June, we've decided to not field a team in the local major race here. I haven't heard much disappointment, either...some of the group will run with other teams (and have in the past), others will probably run independent (or not at all). As for me, I won't be around to see the action. I get to go to Cincinnati. Sometimes I think the national organization decides to switch between cool cities and not-so-cool cities (in my humble opinion) for their national convention. My first convention was in New Orleans - cool city. The first convention I was slated to go to as a rep...Houston - not-so-cool city. First convention as a rep, Chicago - cool city. I hope, sincerely, that Cincinnati is a better city than I suspect. Come on, I like gumbo...deep dish (Chicago-style!) pizza...but I can't seem to get my stomach to jones for Skyline Chili. Oh, next year is in San Francisco, a city I've only been to in utero. That's going to be an expensive endeavor, but well worth the visit. I've got some running friends there who are dying to get together.
I might even get the missus to take a week for that one.

A Matter of Quality

The other week, I came out to the track at five minutes before the start of practice and found a team member jogging laps. Rather than be pleased at their motivation to start early, I was a little less than happy. ‘You’re not going to need those junk miles,’ I said, ‘do you know what I have planned for this workout?’ It’s not so much that I wanted to be authoritarian; I looked at conditions and adjusted my plan accordingly…in this particular case, I moved the warm-up from the track out onto the trails.It’s almost a month before the last races of the late spring season here (we don't race anything other than triathlons during the summer here!), so the time for easy-paced mileage is beginning to pass, at least at the track. The track workouts for my more experienced team members is going to increase (a little) in intensity; higher perceived effort, shorter rest interval or longer distance…two of the three (in the case of some team members, all three) variables more often than not.

I made a comment while writing last month's club newsletter, something to the extent of ‘if you’re not running the repeat at the right intensity level you’re wasting your time.’ This also lends itself to a phrase one of my college coaches used to remind me, ‘you can run hard and you can run long, but you don’t run hard AND long.’ Easy days are where your body - and your mind - makes its gains in fitness. If you hammer all of your workouts, day after day after day…your mind will probably rebel (burnout); hopefully before the point where your body breaks down and you suffer an injury that will leave you frustrated and focusing on rehabilitation.

How do you gauge how hard you’re working; when to back off, when to take it easy? I gauge my workouts by percentage of maximum heart rate above 50 percent (by tens, so 50-59 percent would merit a 1, 60-69 a 2, 70-79 a 3, and so on...) multiplied by time, so if I run for 60 minutes at 50 percent of max heart rate, I score a 60 (1 x 60). Ride a bike for four hours at 50 percent effort would equal 240 (240 x 1), the same as an hour of running with an average heart rate of 80-90 percent (60 x 4), more or less.

You can check your pulse at the end of repeats – rather than your stopwatch - in much the same way as I check my athletes if they have no monitor and I want to know how hard they've been working. A perceived effort scale to “ballpark” your effort works great for weight training, where heart rates are less intense, if you don't want to check your pulse all afternoon.
If you felt the effort on a track workout was 8 on a 1-to-10 scale, then subtract five and multiply by the workout duration (90 minutes, usually), which would give, in this case, a 270. A number in the 100s is an “easy” day; a score above 300 might merit easy workouts for the next day or two, or perhaps a rest day and an easy day. If you’re not doing too much the next day at work you can probably stand to go out and run for an hour, as long as you keep the effort between a 6 and a 7 on that 10-point perceived effort scale.As you approach the racing season, if performing well is your goal, your training focus needs to move away from ‘more miles are better’ and closer to ‘how comfortable am I at this speed? Can I hold this for an entire race?’