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Jul 2007
8:52am, 26 Jul 2007
1,860 posts
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Caterpillar
Well,I think Hendo is right - there is no substitute for personal experience. I guess if you have a story that goes "I used to get injured until I got my HRM..." then we sort of have a different justification for buying one other than directly improved performance.
So if we can bring in personal experience... I've been running for thirty years on and off. I'm never obsessive about it. I don't have time to train for a marathon and would not dream of entering one until I know I will have time to do the miles. But I am a bit of a sad git and have been recording my training in a database for years. For me - and this is objective, not just a feeling - I know that my best running years are those when I put in most miles.
I have never owned a HRM. My personal experience is that I need to go out and do more miles, and the harder the better. A ten mile stroll in the country does nothing for me. A ten mile grind over some hills, setting myself the target of doing the second half faster than the first half and always going for a PB pays dividends a week later.
But it's worse than that. I can walk eight miles in two hours. If I spent two hours running I'd cover 18 miles, and get not just a bit fitter, but massively fitter than a gentle walk.
My experience is that there is no optimum speed/intensity for my training that is LOWER than the best I could do. When I ran my first half marathon I had an annoying watch that went beep beep beep beep to get me to keep pace. (Waste of time really) I know that my legs went at 165 paces per minute. At the time I used to measure my heart rate. It was typically 170. A couple of years later I was a lot fitter and my legs went at 170 and my heart at 165.
These days they're almost exactly in time. Around 170. Training or racing. In theory my "training zone" is up to about 140 bpm, and my MAXIMUM heart rate is 170. Dammit I get a heart rate of 140 when I get an exciting email.
So you see why I'm sceptical. My heart can go at 170 bpm all day. Theoretically - according to heart rate gurus - when I hit 172 and I'm dead from lactic acid and excess hydrogen ions in the fast twitch fibres. My response to that is "cobblers" because the science behind that is tosh.
I'm not telling the rest of you to ditch your heart rate monitors. If you find the HRM, rather than the running, is improving your performance, then stick with it. Personally, I am ignoring the hell out of my heart rate for now, but still willing to be proved wrong.
After all, fifteen million HRM owners can't be wrong, can they.... 
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Jul 2007
8:56am, 26 Jul 2007
64 posts
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MissingPhoenix
Morning Heart Rate folks.
I've just got a garmin and so been reading over this thread and IanM's article to get the best use. I have a (hopefully) quick question though. Sorry if I'm being a bit thick.
IanM in the article you define the "Recovery Ceiling", is that same as the 70% WHR that is discussed a lot on this thread?
Also I assume my Garmin is showing only a % of Max HR so I need to set the HR zones up so that they represent my personal % WHR. I.e. Zone 1 = 90% - 100% WHR, Zone 2 = 80% - 90% etc?
Cheers!!
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Jul 2007
9:14am, 26 Jul 2007
9,430 posts
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Cat I have a feeling that some of what you say could be confusing the debate of hard training all the time and hard easy training. Some schools of thought believe that in order to improve running you must train hard all the time. Some people do this and run the risk of injury by doing so IMHO.
I think that you still need to have easy runs that let your body recover. Some of teh hard trainers however do still have days where they run easier but their easy is still quite fast and hard to most of us...
I do think however that the lactic acid theory of old is probably wrong. I read an article recently that casts doubt on whether lactic build up hinders running and in fact runners can train their bodies to use it as fuel. I will be experimenting with one hard long run per week which I will gradually lengthen. However, I will still run to < 70WHR on my easy days. My personal belief is that the body adapts to whatever you give it and in order to improve you have to keep it guessing by having a good mixture of training which involves hard and easy days as well as hills, flat roads, intervals and teh like.
Missing, I work out what my BPM is for recovery ceiling (yes it is 70%WHR) and then work to that. So if you want to use teh alert set the band to that. Myself I just keep an eye on it and I don't actually use any bands as such on my HRM I just use the two numbers as in the Parker book which keeps it simple...
Basically on easy days I run < = 70%WHR and hard days I run 85%WHR or greater.
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Jul 2007
9:24am, 26 Jul 2007
8,211 posts
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Hendo
I agree with Ian (funny that).
What I will also say is that my own experience contradicts Cat's idea that times improving and HR dropping etc are as a result of increased mileage. I started HR training immediately after training for and running the Paris Marathon. As you will see from that old RW post I dragged up - doing that did not help me in terms of running efficiently as far as my HR was concerned. Of course though it helped fitness but that's not necessarily the issue.
What HR training does is train your body to use fat more effectively as fuel, rather than glycogen, so that when it comes to hard days or race days when you are running over 85% your are burning fat rather than glycogen and 'bonking' - you can maintain a higher pace for longer periods. This is fact.
Clearly it is a case of horses for courses, but my thoughts are that if Cat can run at a quick pace for a long period under 'normal' training, imagine what he can achieve using HR training!
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Jul 2007
9:47am, 26 Jul 2007
1,862 posts
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Caterpillar
Hendo and IanM - I need to tell you some stuff and metabolism. It's the "train your body to use fat as fuel more efficiently" and "runners can train their bodies to use lactic acid as a fuel" comments that are a bit misleading.
Sorry!
I think some "qualified" personal trainers actually don't understand the physiology and metabolism going on and they misquote and misinterpret things.
Cardiac muscle does not work anaerobically. It does not need to. It never has to contract as fast as skeletal muscle and it packed with myoglobin and mitochondra, and gets first call on the oxygenated blood coming from the lungs. It has a special trick, too. It has lots of lactic acid dehydrogenase which effectively puts lactic acid back into the Krebs cycle to generate lots of ATP, but that needs oxygen. So the heart muscle uses lactic acid as a fuel. It does that anyway - if there's lots of lactic acid in your blood. Heart muscle is pretty much immune from fatigue.
During heavy exercise skeletal muscles use carbohydrate as their energy source. Glucose and glycogen. Only when all of that is depleted do skeletal muscles start using fatty acids. That's "the wall" in a marathon. Marathon runners train so that they do NOT have to use fatty acids as the energy source. Why? Because it takes almost twice as much oxygen to use fatty acids as carbohydrates. It's not good for runners. It makes them run slower. The limiting factor is how much oxygen you can get into your body, and even so, fatty acids burn slower and can't release energy as fast as carbohydrates.
Sorry! I'll get me coat.
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Jul 2007
12:11pm, 26 Jul 2007
66 posts
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MissingPhoenix
Thanks IanM.
I wanted to use the HRM/Garmin to see how my training is progressing. Last night I did 6.5 miles which I've now calculated as at average 67% WHR, with one peak above 70% when I did a steep hill. So for me a very worthwhile bit of knowledge, it tells me my training is working and on my easy runs I'm going about the right pace. This is really important for me cos I don't want to get injured/tired/fed up. I've only been running a year and seriously for 6 months.
While it is interesting to get a post like Caterpillars having no biology background I really can't follow it, so would struggle to make use of the obviously excellent content.
To me the HR numbers are easy to follow and I can get a graph out of them, to track how I'm progressing, I'm simple like that!
Cheers guys top posting!
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Jul 2007
12:33pm, 26 Jul 2007
751 posts
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Girlie
Just back from a soggy but good 15 mile run. HR drift set in at exactly the same point as last week(12.3 miles)
felt stronger and better at 11 miles this week though.
My little legs ran out of juice at 14.5 miles though and it was a case of 'just get home'
I did manage a sprint finish in an attempt to do the 15 miles in under 3 hrs, I was 2 secs out!!! But that is 6 mins quicker than last week! Obviously that sent HR soaring, but I was well into drift by that stage, so didn't think it would matter this once.
Here are the numbers
total avg HR 146( 68%)
Max HR 182(94%)
avg pace 12:00/mi
Best pace 7:59/mi
Lap 1( 12.30 miles)
avg Hr 144( 67%)
Avg pace 12:30/mi
Lap 2(2.7miles)
Avg HR 158( 77%)
Avg Pace 11:41/mi
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Jul 2007
12:40pm, 26 Jul 2007
9,431 posts
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Yes I think maybe the issue is getting rather over complicated. I use the HRM (as I have repeatedly said) to make sure that I have a definite difference between hard days and easy days because I believe that recovery is as important as exercise. If I were to run flat out every day I would not get faster (I've tried it) I would just get injured.
I'm not sure at all of how right or wrong any of the biology of this is to be honest but I don't particularly care either. All that matters to me really is that I have an easy way of making sure I run easy days and hard days so I can run more miles without risking injury as much as I used to.
I think the gist of the lactate article was that it doesn't impede running performance as many people have historically believed (allegedly). This gives me faith to try harder and get used to training in the lactate zone because I now realise that it is more of a mental thing rather than a physical thing. That is my legs may feel heavy and it may feel very hard to carry on running but the more I do that the better I will get at coping with it and thus become faster...
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Jul 2007
1:22pm, 26 Jul 2007
8,216 posts
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Hendo
I also think that Cat has been quite quick to discredit those who support an argument for HR training, yet believe those who support an argument against it. If it was all bollocks and didn't work then we wouldn't bother...
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Jul 2007
1:25pm, 26 Jul 2007
8,217 posts
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Hendo
Good run by the way Girlie
WGT - once a week at 85% sounds like a good plan to me*
*no scientific evidence to prove this is available however
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