Endurance Training
Food for thought. During long distance events, what happens when HR and Pace/power levels don't match? Is that a sign that our aerobic system needs work?
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Food for thought. During long distance events, what happens when HR and Pace/power levels don't match? Is that a sign that our aerobic system needs work?
Comments
pace/power is a measure of how hard your legs are working (ie. how hard your legs are hitting the ground/pushing on the pedals)
HR is a measure of all the work your body is doing (how hard your heart has to work, based on all of the draws, from your legs to ventilation to heat dissipation, to concentration/focus and fighting off fatigue, etc).
When your HR is higher at a given power/pace, it means your whole system is working harder to maintain that effort. Could be due to inadequate training (though, IMO, that's unusual), or it could be due to a poor pacing strategy (went too hard in the early phases, fatigue setting in) or it could be due to heat, poor hydration, poor nutrition, sunburn setting in, GI distress, illness, or other factors.
It's important to pay attention to HR, because if it starts to drift up, it's a clear signal something is going south. You should not expect to just hang on to power/pace and hope for the best, as it usually doesn't work out that way.
just semantics, but I think the analogy is more appropriate.
Agree with Mike...HR is a reflection of everything goin on with your body including hydration etc....
John - what would have been interesting is seeing what your HR would have been at 8:40's....if it was say 144...then it probably still Z1/2 remember these ranges are approximations....
So I think the key is....running various paces...establishing your personal HR range that correllates...then using both to guide or I should say manage effort.
Good Luck with the M!
Or something like that. It made sense when I read it but now that I try and write it, it sounds suspect.
I have seen it in every marathon that I have done though. I had always set out to hold a steady pace and ove rthe course of hours you can see my hr creep up. I like your idea of using HR as a govenor. I am going to do the same thing in a 70.3 on sunday. If I top out at 170bpm when I run a 5kTT, I dont want to be there till the very end of the 13.1.
I practiced and hope to execute on 155bpm max for the first 1/3, then 160 for the 2nd and then to fo with what is left for the last 1/3.
If you do run your mary with a hr limit, please let everyone know how it goes. Good luck!
Unchain yourself in the last 5-8 K of the race. At some point, you have to empty the tank, bank account, whatever, and holding yourself artificially in check with any metric, be it pace or HR or even RPE, become counterproductive to achieving the best possible time. Just don't save yourself to sprint the last 400 meters; that's how people kill themselves.
I could never get to my pace cause my HR was just high. I have not used a HR monitor for almost three years now and my power and pace took a pretty sweet jump! I might throw on the HR monitor during the OS just to see how it is correlating with my PE and the simple answer was - yep if the workout seems hard then my heart rate was high, etc.
If heart rate were the input, then you would go faster because your heart started beating faster...
In EN we're usually asked to ignore HR and just execute the power/pace. This works, for a while. Eventually the athlete either reaches a plateau, or burns out.
Ignoring healthy normal HR response is a recipe for long term athletic disaster; the end of the annual OS cycle is littered with thrashed athletes.
The power/pace/RPE/HR matrix is a balance; ignore one or more at your peril.
I can feel , by my RPE, what it is that is going on internally and may not want to look at a HR. My HRM monitor may show I'm 20 points higher than where I should be like 2 miles from the finish line . I stopped looking at the numbers because in my head the fight goes on slow down, no maintain, slow down... ha ha... Really one less thing I need to be concerned with as HR variables jump around due to lack of sleep, dehydration and heat .
My 2 cent.
I actually see where you are coming from with your interpretation of input/output, but I agree with Mike that HR is ultimately an output. I think of it this way - power/pace is a primary metric where you are going at X mph (on the bike) or min/mile (running). Over the course of something like a marathon (just to relate this to the OP), that pace can remain the same, but the HR changes due to dehydration, fatigue and other factors. So, early in the marathon, you give it an input of, say, 8 min/miles - there is a black box of physiological factors, and the output is, say, 150 bpm for a HR. Later on in the marathon, as fatigue sets in, if you want to maintain that same 8 min/mile pace, the black box of physiological factors has different contents, and now the resulting HR for that same 8 min/mile pace is 160 bpm. I don't know if that helps or not.
@Al - sprinting to the end. I used to do that, but recently decided to stop. Strong finish is great, but I've been finding out that you are quite correct, literally, in that it is how people die.
To Bill's point about ignoring HR - I tend to agree that if you ignore it completely, it can spell disaster. One of the ways people determine their recovery state is observing their resting HR in the morning. Over time, one gets to notice a pattern of recovered vs not recovered from the previous workout. In one case, I know of someone who could tell from their daily readings that 2 weeks after IMLP, their HR was still off, and he knew he wasn't fully recovered, and as a result, knew he wasn't ready to go back to the same workload of stressful workouts.
That being said, I've tended to ignore HR a bit during the EN hill or threshold workouts, and too have seen great gains. But I still check in every so often to make sure my HR isn't wonky. I think it's a case where paying attention to pace during a training run is good to allow pushing yourself beyond what you might otherwise, but paying attention to something like HR during a rest interval, or a warm up, or a cool down, is good to ensure that your body is adequately absorbing and handling the stress you are placing on it. At least, that is what I've found.