Running: Geeky science update
Aug. 1st, 2009 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zoeimogenAs a result of signing myself up for the 10k run in a couple of months and also due to the Army thing, I thought it would be a good idea to get some sort of heart rate monitor or similar device for running to help me improve. The sergeant that was driving up to Grantham last weekend also mentioned he had a GPS training watch, so I thought I'd investigate and ended up getting myself a shiny Garmin 405 GPS/Heart Rate Monitor watch.
I'll skip the dull technology review but so far, after one run this morning with it on, I'm quite impressed although it will take a while for me to figure out all the functions and use it correctly. One feature I'm particularly interested in the "virtual partner" you run against to keep pace - I have a tendency to either start off too fast or too slow - but managed to mess that up by setting a pace of 9min/km. Oops - I was thinking in mines per mile, I wanted more like 6 minutes per km!
I was already vaguely aware that there's a target heart rate that's idea for longer distance training so I had a quick search online before going for this mornings run and found it's about 70-80% of "maximum heart rate", my maximum being in the 185bpm mark. I need to do some more research but I kept an eye on my heart rate during the run and slowed down whenever I noticed it was above 175bpm. This worked well - I managed a quite reasonable time. After the run I managed to get a nice graph of my speed and heart rate...
...oops, well outside the ideal zone. More reading required, but I think I need to start running slower, which explains why I'm improving on shorter runs but not over distance. I'm always pretty knackered after about 20 minutes, which is about right given that I guess I'm usually sitting in the top 90-100% zone (I don't usually back off as much as I did today) and you're not supposed to be able to maintain that zone for that long.
I'll skip the dull technology review but so far, after one run this morning with it on, I'm quite impressed although it will take a while for me to figure out all the functions and use it correctly. One feature I'm particularly interested in the "virtual partner" you run against to keep pace - I have a tendency to either start off too fast or too slow - but managed to mess that up by setting a pace of 9min/km. Oops - I was thinking in mines per mile, I wanted more like 6 minutes per km!
I was already vaguely aware that there's a target heart rate that's idea for longer distance training so I had a quick search online before going for this mornings run and found it's about 70-80% of "maximum heart rate", my maximum being in the 185bpm mark. I need to do some more research but I kept an eye on my heart rate during the run and slowed down whenever I noticed it was above 175bpm. This worked well - I managed a quite reasonable time. After the run I managed to get a nice graph of my speed and heart rate...
...oops, well outside the ideal zone. More reading required, but I think I need to start running slower, which explains why I'm improving on shorter runs but not over distance. I'm always pretty knackered after about 20 minutes, which is about right given that I guess I'm usually sitting in the top 90-100% zone (I don't usually back off as much as I did today) and you're not supposed to be able to maintain that zone for that long.
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Also, the hoops you have to jump through on this site to comment on a blog are maddening.
You can actually comment on the LJ version too - DW used to crosspost saying that, the "Please comment there using OpenID" is a recent addition and one I just removed from the LJ version of the post :-)