Know Your Heart Rate

The next time you’re out riding or running, play a little game and try to guess your heart rate every 15 minutes or so.  Pay attention to how your legs feel, how hard you’re breathing, and what kind of terrain you’re in.  The more you do this the better you’ll get at predicting your HR based on those feelings.  This will help weed out those ‘off’ days when you feel like you’re working hard but that commuter comes ripping by you wearing a back pack and helmet mirror.  When you’re good at it you’ll know that your HR should be sitting at 150 for a given effort.  Then have a look at your HR monitor, if you see something way off -like 135 ish - and your legs feel like your normal 150 effort, you’ll know it could be good to start thinking about a day off.  Especially if it happens regularily over the course of a couple training sessions.   This ‘low HR to high leg pain’ usually occurs on the bike when you’re tired.  We’ve found the opposite to be true when running.  Honestly we don’t have a good explanation as to why that is, perhaps someone would like to share.  It most likely varies from person to person.  When we’re getting really tired and the training load has been somewhat large, we often find that the aerobic running HR is higher than normal for a given effort in the aerobic zone.