35 mins/40:43 (3½ miles)
Last night I bought a heart rate monitor. I've been agonising about the features in the different models, and worrying over whether or not I will even like how the monitor sensor strap feels, but this week's PFit seminar was on HRMs and the presenter pointed out that Performace Bike have a basic model on sale at $35. Which is cheap enough to buy and not worry about cost, at least.
The down side is that because all that this Polar Beat does is monitor your heart rate, I now have to wear two watches: timer on one wrist, HRM on the other. I also need to figure out my zones and so on, and measure my resting heart rate, and all that other good stuff.
But I have an HRM, and I have run with it, and I can confirm that my heart is beating.
Part of the point of wearing the monitor on this morning's run before I'd done any of the maths required to figure out target zones was to get some broad sense of where my heart rate is now, what my spikes are like, and how fast I am recovering. The following are some observed numbers (from memory - as I say, this HRM doesn't do any of that recording heart rates over time or anything like that), with percentages of my supposed maximum heart rate of 183:
| Standing around before running: |
58-60 (31-33%) |
| Walking to warm up: |
117-120 (64-65%) |
| Running up a gentle hill: |
155 (84%) |
| Running up a steeper hill early on: |
164-167 (89-91%) |
| Running on a flat bit and down hill: |
145-155 (79-85%) |
| Standing at a crossing: |
117 (64%) |
| Running up a steeper hill later on: |
170 (93%) |
Now, my suggested maximum is based on the formula 220-age, which has been to a degree discredited. Indeed, I know for a fact that only five years ago I could exercise consistently at a heart rate of 195, which is a good deal higher than the formula would have suggested at the time. And that was not the end of my tether, either. I suspect my actual maximum is probably still around 190 or thereabouts.
But, it's a starting point. A good guideline.
I think I might have to back off a bit on the hills, but this is exactly the information I wanted to figure out.
Now, where did I put that zone information?
Posted by Dunx at July 13, 2004 08:38 AM