Thursday, June 14, 2007

Flexibility and a New Resting Heart Rate



Well I am flying solo this week, so to speak. My husband is hiking the Appalachian Trail with his brother for the next week and a half.

So my training schedule needs to be flexible. My older daughter is old enough to watch her sister for short periods of time - so this week it is going to be earlier runs and shorter in duration. Perhaps I will do a couple of days of 2 shorter runs.

Due to adjusting to the schedule and getting rained out yesterday afternoon, I missed my afternoon 3 mile run. I am not terribly disappointed...it is the first variation from my training plan in over 3 weeks. I still got a chance to do my strength training this afternoon while my kids played at a friends house. And I kicked butt on the elliptical. For the first time, I didn't feel like I was going to die after 15 min. I did 35 minutes instead of the usual 30 today. This weekend I will need to do my long run on Saturday instead of Sunday because of a scheduled sleepover Sat night. I will need to stay nearby for this 9 miler. I will probably just add a mile onto my neighborhood 8 miler route and stay within 2.5 miles of the house.

Now for you Garmin 305 or heart rate monitor owners....I wanted to measure my resting heart rate - and figured the best way was to hook my Garmin up and let the heart rate monitor tell me. So I placed the Garmin and strap next to my bed - so I could place it on when I woke up without getting out of bed.

The result....my resting heart rate is 50 bpm. I saw it go as low as 49 once, but it pretty much hovered around 50 and 51. That is pretty cool. That means my heart is more efficient and can do with 50 beats what it used to do with 58.

I should recalculate my max heart rate. As I noted, I have not seen my heart rate rise higher than about 177 in quite some time. Last year it got to 189 bpm once. I have been using that for MHR. Using the formulas and calculators online, my MHR comes out to about 180 bpm. That is probably pretty close.

This will change my training zones slightly - even using 184 bpm as a max rate, my aerobic zone lowers to about 156 bpm. That is pretty consistent with my running lately. This means I may not be staying in my aerobic zone as much as I thought....which is good. A few times I wanted to push my anaerobic rate but wasn't getting there. Perhaps the calculation was wrong and I have been working it after all.

Sigh....

Episode 7 is just about ready and will probably go out tomorrow!

3 comments:

Cory said...

That is awesome news about your resting heart rate. Your training is really paying off.

Maddy said...

I was sitting outside the other day and was going to see what my heart rate was -nothing scientific - just to see...

Your posts have got me thinking that I'm noy paying attention to my heart rate - and I should be.

I couldn't find my pulse. After 45 seconds of trying, I gave up.

I'm leaning more and more toward getting a heart rate monitor.

MarathonChris said...

I have learned a lot from my heart rate monitor and my heart rate. It basically tells me how hard I am working. Although you can get a good idea by how you feel, your brain can play tricks and convince you those other signs are off. A definitive number like a heart rate helps me know immediately if the rest of me is sending the right signal.

I have used it to tell me when I need to take it easy - particularly on those really hot days - when the heart has to work so much harder to keep you cool and keep you going.

Then again, I am a geek.

The Garmin 305 is very cool.... :-)