Monitoring the Situation

Got to the gym today for my regular Tuesday run. Yes, I admit it's pathetic that I opted to run inside on a 60 degree day, but I've been lazy about my allergy shots and springtime makes me sneeze and cough and my chest tightens up, which isn't very conducive to running. Anyway.

I did 10 minutes of walking to warm up, then started an easy run, no plans, just seeing how long I could keep it up. And for the first time, when I had to pause to stretch out my calves here and there during the run (it's not nearly as bad as last year, but I still have definite tightness) it occurred to me to check my HR too.

Been thinking a lot about training to a target heart rate lately. Heard Iron Wil talk about it on the podcast, seen everybody talk about their monitors on their blogs, but all this time I thought it wasn't for me. I'm still so slow because I'm still carrying so much extra weight that I wasn't getting my HR up that far anyway, so why on earth would I need to monitor it?

And that's been my thinking all along. Until I heard the podcast when Wil's coach listed a monitor as a piece of essential equipment. And then, two weeks ago, my swim instructor (can I just tell ya how much I LOVE her?) introduced me to the torturous world of sprint repeats and explained how doing them affected my HR and in turn my speed and blah blah blah. You guys know. She's also been telling me from the first day that I go much too slow, I take it much too easy, and I need to get aerobic with it because my speed (or lack thereof) problem isn't just bad form. This was all a huge eye-opener for me; my mind was finally making the connection that you can use your heart rate as a tool to improve performance. And I'm finally making the internal paradigm shift that I really am that fit now, and that this is the next logical step for me.

Which brought me to my tentative experiments today with checking my HR while running on the treadmill.

It seemed really, ridiculously high when I was running. Even when I kind of felt ok it was in the 170s, and at one point I felt like I was working pretty hard so I checked and it was 189! Whenever it went over 175 I'd take a little drink or stretch break for a few seconds and run again after it got back down to around 160. Which still seems way too high.

Now, I remember Wil saying that her coach had her doing long slow runs at a 140 HR, and this was supposed to be a long slow run for me. Can't get much slower, at the beginning of my runs I'm doing a 13:30 pace, which even feels plodding to me! At my fastest, after I start to feel good, I did a little work as fast (ok, "fast") as 11:30 pace.

So, I think it's time for me to get a monitor. I don't know what to get, and I don't really know what I'm looking for in terms of HR training zones once I get it. All I know is that I loathe the idea of a chest strap and that 189 is way to freaking high. (For the record, my RHR, a few hours post-workout, is 76 bpm.)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

(Oh btw, managed to run for 20 minutes, albeit with a few stretching pauses, longest run time ever!)