The Beat, Beat, Beat of My Heart

I love my new heart monitor! I've used a heart monitor extensively when I was training for inline skating marathons. It's not possible, though, to skate and pay a lot of attention to my heart rate--I used the monitor mainly to track my minutes per mile. I'd watch my average heart rate and pay attention to the peaks, but didn't really have a good sense of what my heart rate was doing.

When I used my heart rate monitor at spinning on Sunday, I spent most of the workout in the 135-145 beats per minute range. At one point, I hit 160, but was nervous about it being that high. According to the heart rate charts, at age 60, my maximum heart rate is supposed to be 160, and I was supposed to be working at 80% of maximum, which would be 128. I know that's way too low--when I was inline skating, I would regularly average 150 beats a minute in a 24 mile training skate. But I didn't know how much time I was spending in the 150s and above.

I was braver today. Once I warmed up, I spent most of the workout in the 155-165 beats per minute range, and hit a high of 169. That felt fine--I knew I wasn't working in the anaerobic zone because I wasn't struggling with my breathing and I wasn't feeling any lactic acid build up in my muscles. It really felt great to be able to work out at that  level. I started feeling bad that I may not be able to inline skate again. I will be in such great shape to start training in the spring that I would have a great shot at hitting my goal of a 2 hour marathon. I almost did it a couple of years ago--I was on pace for it in my last few 24 mile training runs, but the day of the marathon, it was 28 degrees (this was in early September) and there was a head wind. It was 28 here today, and everyone is in winter coats and boots. The day of the marathon, I was in shorts and a t-shirt. Who could imagine it would be 28 degrees that early in the year--even in Minnesota. It comes down to whether I'm willing to risk breaking a bone if I fall. I've only fallen a few times in the many years I've skated, but it only takes once to disrupt my life--particularly if I fell on a hip and broke it.

But in the meantime, I'm having a great time working out and spinning--I don't need to worry about what I'm going to do in the spring.