Giving It A Tri

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Inspiration from Lord Chesterfield

"A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres, and infallibly prevails at last." --Lord Chesterfield

This heart incident has to be looked at as just a bump in the road. I have a stress test scheduled this afternoon at the doctor's office. I'm a little nervous about it, but am expecting that it will be normal. I'm actually hoping that I'll get a full blown test so that it will give me some insight into my maximum heart rate and possibly my VO2-max. One of the first things I did when I received my heart rate monitor was measure some basic baseline information. The first was my resting heart rate. I took my heart rate while resting several times. I even wore it to bed one night. I always got the same reading, 70bpm. My monitor also has some extra functions that Polar calls MyIndex and OwnOptimizer. MyIndex simply measures resting heart rate and then projects other basic fitness measurements, such as maximum heart rate and VO2-max. I was projected to have a maximum heart rate of 180 which is a good 7 beats lower than my age predicted max (220 - age). My VO2-max was projected at 29, which is pretty bad!

Last night, I thought I would update these measurements. Before I went to bed I did both MyIndex and OwnOptimizer. My resting heart rate was an astounding 54! It is not possible to make such gains in a week. So either I have some wrong measurements or perhaps my body was trying to recover last week and I suffered from an elevated heart rate. I hardly had any workout on Monday and Tuesday I took off, so perhaps that was the rest that I needed. Or perhaps I was suffering from a bug. I will need to do more measurements to be sure.

My max heart rate was projected as 177, which is a whole 10 beats less than my age predicted max. It seems too slow, because I have often run at 165-177 and I was not that uncomforatable. Also, max heart rate isn't supposed to vary that much. This is one of the reasons I'm hoping my stress test will give me an accurate number. This number is very important for training, because the best way to control training intensity is to limit it to a percentage of your maximum heart rate. My VO2-max was projected at 32. This would move me from a "very poor" to "poor" rating. I can't complain about that.