[kocanez]

I am a “hiker” on the 6th week of base period training. General goal is to get faster at hiking; eventually be able to do 20 miles/5000+ft elevation gain in a day, long term goal >1 yr of climbing mt rainier.

Most of my aerobic training (Aet calculated by treadmill as 140) thus far has been fast hiking on rocky/hilly trails and the stepper machine, as I dont live in the mts. Recently I have had to add extra weight to my pack to get my HR in the 115-140 z1/2 range. I also decided to explore trail running since a friend of mine asked me to come with him to weekly local 5k trail races; I stopped running a couple years ago after a couple ankle injuries.

I am guessing I have ADS; HR bounces up to 155-185 when running, not even fast (11 min mi or so pace). I just finished my first race tonight and no joke, for 31 minutes my avg HR was 190, max HR 204, 10-11 min mile. Does that even make sense as far as being able to sustain 93 % of my HR for 30 min??

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/3719701009

I would like to continue doing the weekly races; I am assuming since it is only 30 minutes and I am at 10 hrs/week of aerobic training that it shouldn’t have too negative of an impact.

Question is: if I continue to do most of my aerobic work fast hiking/stepper, will this improve my aerobic ability enough to make my running more efficient? Or do I just have to run more, only really really slowly?

tx in advance

Topic

[death.jester]

death.jester on June 6, 2019 at 4:05 am #23023

Hey kocanez. I’m not an expert, I can’t give you a lot of advice. I just have general remark. It seems you tracked your heart rate with the Vivosmart 4 (wrist-based heart rate monitor)? Or did you wear an external chest strap? Because the heart rate measurements on the wrist are kind of unprecise. I mean for a constant activity (where your heartrate is constantly elevated) such as running they are usually “fine”, and I don’t think it is heavily off, but if you do interval training or exercises that only elevate your heartrate for a few seconds, then the wrist heartrate monitor is completely useless, because it’s too slow to catch up. I have observed this already quiet often with my Fenix 5. My advise would be to repeat your run with the chest-based heart rate monitor and compare the results.

Apart from that your heart rate of course heavily depends on your age. But it seems like you are also suffering from ADS, like me 😉

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on June 6, 2019 at 6:54 am #23025

Good catch, @deathjester! (And cool alias.)

@kocanez: @deathjester is correct. Wrist-based HR monitors are pretty useless for serious endurance training. I would re-do any tests with a heart rate strap and postpone any conclusions about race data.

As far as high heart rates during races, your values are higher than average, but not uncommon.