The totally unscientific way of working out your HR

Back in October last year, I finally considered myself a proper runner; despite lacing up the trainers 4 times a week, training for a half with a half under my belt, regular attendance of parkrun, I hadn't considered applying the moniker 'runner' until someone at work, off-handedly said,

"Oh, you should ask Jen. She's a runner.

And I paused to consider the veracity of the statement, actually quite pleased that someone had noticed and considered me to be one. I managed to winkle some kind of compliment out of it, but I'm not sure that a compliment was entirely the sentiment, as the statement was uttered with a not inconsiderable look of bafflement and mild horror. But take it I did.

Therefore, now freshly and legitimately tarred with the runner brush, I thought I should invest in some new kit. Namely a Garmin.

In an attempt to work out my heart rate zone thingummy and get the best out of this (reassuringly expensive) piece of kit, I thought ‘pffft, how accurate is max HR = 220 - age?’ as a basis for training?

So, out I went in October, in what can only be described as Old Testament rain conditions, to run a 2 miles warm-up at tempo (under 158bpm, a challenge) with the final 1 mile at an increasing pace every 400m, culminating in the final 400m flat out.

Then, one looks to see the max HR achieved, and this, my increasingly disinterested reader, is ‘your’ max HR.

This is obviously less fun than it sounds.

Well, objective achieved, as my max HR in this final sprint (I say sprint, but anyone observing would have argued it resembled absolutely nothing of the sort) was in fact 181bpm, rather than the suggested 176bpm.

A bit of tweaking to the parameters on the Garmin, and it looked like my tempo runs needed to be kept under 168, rather than 158, which fit better for me at the time, with the ‘comfortably uncomfortable’ description of a tempo run.

It must be noted, however, that this incredibly scientific experiment was NOT conducted on a track (as I believe it should be) or even a treadmill (gold standard) but in the dark, in torrential rain, dodging the deeper puddles / suspicious piles of autumn leaves (beware the lurking turds) / geese (around the docks) and stopping frequently during the warm up run to rescue little snail buddies from being crushed underfoot.

Tl;dr: I think I worked out more accurate HR zones