Too hard

Over the last couple of weeks, my heart rate has been about twenty beats higher per minute than usual on some of my easy runs, making me wonder if either me or my watch is off somehow? Other times, all has seemed perfectly fine. Yesterday however, after an exceptionally hard uphill treadmill run at USM, I started to feel some localised pain in the left side of my chest. Even if the pain was not accompanied by any other symptoms, thank God, it obviously made me concerned that I have been pushing myself too hard recently, so I decided to skip my planned afternoon jog despite the brilliant sunshine outside.

Today, the pain is still there but I can now more clearly feel that it is connected to similar muscle soreness in my stomach, so I decided to go for a run along the river as the weather is simply irresistible right now. Fortunately, this time around, my heart rate stayed around 135 bpm for the duration of the run.

When following a lot of elite people on Strava, I think it is easy to start aiming for too much, too fast, while forgetting that they are people too. To counter that, I decided to take a page from Emelie Forsberg’s playbook and finish today’s run with a cinnamon bun.