Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The HRM Chronicles

I've been about as good at updating the Pigdog as I have running. This is a strange period for me. I'm not completely healed from the Achilles injury, yet I can comfortably run up to 20 miles a week or so. After the tongue-lashing from Anonymous, I've tried to enter "21st century training." That's meant wearing a heart monitor three of the last four runs. (One was an Eagles victory celebration run that didn't need my heart rate recorded. I'm sure it was off the charts.) So far, so OK. I don't really like wearing the thing or the overly complicated system. My runs have been in the 8:00 per mile range with my heart rate around 128-130. Is this right? I have no idea. The usual formula for finding training pace is to find the maximum heart rate. I'm 36. That gives me a max heart rate of 184. That would put my effort during these runs at about 70 percent. As far as I can tell, that's about right for an easy, normal run. Right now, I'm not sure what I do with the heart rate info. It's nice to know, but I haven't figured out what zones to keep my runs in just yet. Besides, I'm not really doing radically different workouts. I go for easy 4.5-5 mile runs.

The more interesting thing for me is healing the Achilles. That's when I can get back to training for real. The data stuff is interesting, yet I don't quite see how it would be anything more than a guide. I don't want to just follow numbers on a watch all the time. My guess is I'd use it to set a baseline for training, with particular emphasis on using the HRM to keep recovery runs as true recovery.

4 comments:

JPS said...

do you have any HR-based plans available? Once you have done a threshold test (such fun - 15-20 mins of torture, aka a 5k), you'll know your anaerobic threshold HR and you can calculate your zones (1-5). Most training plans have blocks or intervals allocated to be a specific time in a specific zone. The age-related formulas have a wide margin of error - mine differs from actual by about 10-15 bpm.

Neil Davis said...

Dude, 125-130 HR @ 7.5 mph for someone who is "out of shape" is crazy low. I push 138 @ 5.8 mph. Then again I've been exercising for 6 months and I'm 40. Last time I did anything at all was in 1992 during a college fitness course.

If I had those numbers, I'd be pretty happy! Hopefully I'll get there...

Anonymous said...

Build a composition to house your garden compost in. As a result of character of compost, it often positive aspects a homeowner to hide the decaying materials from most people. This offers you an opportunity to protect the rich compost from dangerous lighting radiation which may hinder the growth of proper rotting germs. [url=http://www.ss12w12ws.info]Pro232rgram[/url]

Anonymous said...

Maintain cellular users under consideration when selecting the size of your concept. You may well be composing your emails on the check which has 4 as well as 5 times the accessible pixels that the cell phone customer has. Send out your communications little or scalable so that everyone can read them quickly and easily. Scan2122344d