Tag Archives: running

Heart rate monitor training for the reluctant runner

· 10 Replies

My wife loves to run. I, in contrast, find running to be boring and unpleasant. But I run all the same, because it keeps me relatively thin and makes me feel better for the 23.5 hours per days that I’m not running. Before I had a normal-ish job and a family, I was running a fair number of miles – around 35-40 miles/week. But life got in the way, and I’ve been off-and-on for a few years now. The problem with off-and-on running is that it keeps you just fit enough to get through the runs, but not fit enough to get through them in a pleasant manner. I’d find myself running five miles one week, twenty miles the next, and feeling exhausted with every step. Combined with my natural distaste for running, this unpleasantness made for an exercise regimen that was hard to stick to.

So, last summer I decided that I’d mix things up, and I bought myself a heart rate monitor. (This one.) I figured that I wasn’t enjoying my running routine, and it wasn’t much of a routine anyway, so I might as well go whole hog into a training plan that was totally foreign to me; I didn’t have much to lose. I’ve been faithfully training with the heart rate monitor for about a year now, and overall it’s been a really positive change.

The first thing I did when I got the watch was to ask my wife if she had any resources for training with a HRM. Surprise! she had several, and she grabbed one for me from her unreasonably large library of running books. I found Heart Monitory Training for the Compleat Idiot by John Parker to be a helpful resource: written specifically for runners (as opposed to, say, triathletes), a very quick read, and full of advice that I found sensible and not overbearing.

The main takeaway from the book (spoiler alert) is that most people run most of their miles far too fast. When your “easy” runs aren’t legitimately easy, you’re never rested for the hard runs, and you never build the kind of stamina that you really need for distance running. (At the risk of sounding like a running nerd, the idea is to do the majority of your miles under your lactate threshold.) The heart monitor is used as a gauge for enforcing easy runs. The magic number is 70%: on easy days, keep your heart rate below 70% of your heart rate reserve, a figure which is calculated by subtracting your resting rate from your max rate, and then using your resting rate as a floor. For me, the calculation was something like this. I did a max heart rate workout (found a steep hill on a hot day and did repeats) and got my HR up to 192. Measured my resting rate over a couple mornings and called it 58. 192-58 * 70% = 94, which when added to 58 gives me an easy run ceiling of 152 BPM.

The first thing you learn when you start staying under this target rate during easy runs is that holy crap this is slow. I was accustomed to doing easy runs around 8-8:30/mile pace. With the HRM, on a hot July day, I found myself running at 10:00+. You also learn that hills are really serious business when it comes to heart rate. To stay under the 70% threshold on hills of any size, my shuffle devolved into a near-walk. It was torture. Physically, I had no idea what to do with my body when going that slow (your form totally changes). And mentally, I was humiliated getting passed by grandmas, kids, invalids.

But, I stuck with it, and after a few months things started to click. The weather started to cool. I found techniques for modifying my form up and down hills that would let me maintain some speed while keeping my heart rate down. And most importantly, I think that I really was building the kind of aerobic fitness that’d been promised in the book. Within four or five months, most of my easy runs were back down at 8:30 pace or faster – and they were all below the 70% HR threshold.

Some cool things happen when most of your runs are easy. For one, you can really go balls out on hard runs. Because there’s no latent fatigue from the previous few days (and because I know I’ll get legitimate rest over the ensuing days) I can pretty much run myself into the ground during workouts. Another benefit is that you can immediately start adding distance, because you never, ever feel tired during easy runs. I end every run thinking, gee, I feel like I haven’t even gone out yet. For someone who was used to feeling like shit after every run, this is a huge and welcome change that makes the whole endeavor much less unpleasant. Tracking your heart rate also gives you window into your general health. You might feel fine and plan to hit the streets at your normal pace, but if you are coming off of a cold (or have one coming on), your heart rate will be elevated, and you’ll be forced to slow down.

A couple weeks ago I ran the first road race that I’d done in a number of years. Looking back through my running logs, I see that the last time I ran a 5K at that pace, I’d been running twice as many miles per week, and I was five years younger. Granted, I’m still not running very fast in any objective sense, but this is still a pretty cool side effect of running a bunch of junk miles.

If you’re a runner and feeling like you’re in a rut – or if you’re someone who’s tried to run in the past, but could never get over that initial god-how-can-anyone-endure-this-torture phase – I highly recommend getting a heart rate monitor, and learning how to use it during training. It makes running more interesting and less painful. (Though I still don’t like it like my wife does.)

Garmin Forerunner 310XT hacks

· 2 Replies

I’ve been running with a Garmin Forerunner 310XT for about eight months now. I like it pretty well (running with a HR monitor has totally changed my running for the better, but that’s a subject for another post), but there are a couple really annoying things about it, which I’ve been forced to hack workarounds for.

  • For me, the plastic that houses the transponder on the chest strap caused pretty severe chafing. I think this is something that Garmin is aware of; my wife has a previous version from the same series (the 305, I think), and the strap design does seem improved. But for me, the first month or two was pretty terrible. The chafing was awful, and running four days a week, I never had a chance to heal. I tried all different kinds of lube, tried different ways of positioning the monitor (around the center of my chest vs just under my armpits), played with different levels of tightness. What ultimately ended up working for me was this. I wear it around the narrowest part of my chest, with the strap fairly loose. When I’m running more than five or six miles, I use a bit of runner’s glide. And – this has made the biggest difference for me – I wrapped the big hunk of plastic in a couple layers of athletic tape. It still irritates me a bit, but there’s no more bleeding.

    2014-02-16 15.11.17

  • The watch has this cool feature where you put a little USB nub in your computer, and it’s supposed to auto-download your latest activity as soon as the watch comes into range. This has worked for me maybe five times, tops. Typically, the software doesn’t recognize the watch at all, and for the first few weeks I owned it, I struggled to find a workflow that’d let me store my workouts on my computer. The only way I could make it work consistently is by re-pairing the watch + computer every time I want to download. Here’s what I do when I get back from a run (I use a Mac for this):
    1. Close the Garmin ANT Agent program in the toolbar
    2. Delete the local Garmin data folder: rm -rf ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin
    3. Start the Garmin ANT Agent application
    4. From the Garmin toolbar menu, choose “Pair with New Devices”. Within a few minutes, it’ll start re-syncing

    Aside from the general fact that this it’s Extremely Stupid, the annoying thing about the process is that it takes progressively longer to complete the more workouts you have on your watch (because you’re deleting your local cache, it’s got to download all of them each time). So, every few weeks, I delete all activities from the watch. But before doing so – because I don’t trust Garmin’s “Garmin Connect” online service – I make sure to copy the .tcx files from my local directory to some safe location. That way, I have offline access to my running history if I want it. cp ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/Devices/xxxxxxxxxxxx/History/* /some/other/location (where “xxxxxxxxxxxx” is your device ID).

Brooklyn is for runners

· 6 Replies

I lived in Brooklyn when I started running in my mid-twenties. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was spoiled.

I never really enjoyed running for its own sake. I did it because my then-girlfriend (now-wife) was a serious runner, and because I wanted to continue to eat and drink as I pleased without risking my girlish figure. I managed to tolerate running thanks only to my Brooklyn backdrop. Over the course of about five years, I ran some 5,000 miles on Brooklyn’s streets. It was my way of learning the grid. From Williamsburg, I got to know Greenpoint, Bushwick, Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights; from Park Slope, it was Windsor Terrace and Kensington and Sunset Park and Bay Ridge; from Carroll Gardens, it was Red Hook and DUMBO and the waterfront. I have a decent mental map of maybe a third of Brooklyn’s seventy square miles, thanks to these here legs.

So I came to think of myself as an “urban runner”. Pounding the pavement was my way of getting to know my surroundings, and soaking up the city was my way of coping with running.

Then I moved to Queens, and everything changed. I’m not talking about Whitestone or Hollis or Rockaway or some other deep-Queens neighborhood. I lived in Ridgewood, about five blocks from the border with Brooklyn. But it was a totally different world. The car-to-pedestrian ratio was out of whack, which resulted in a totally different relationship between drivers and non-drivers. Instead of grumbling deference, I came to expect outright hostility from cars. I can’t count the number of times a driver sped up – or ran a stop sign – to beat me through an intersection. I even got hit once (albeit slowly), even after having made eye contact with the driver.

To make matters worse, Queens (or at least my portion of it) was boring. The semi-suburban neighborhoods bleed together in my mind: Glendale, Elmhurst, Woodside, Maspeth, Middle Village, Forest Park, Woodhaven. I know Queens is a (ethnically, linguistically, culinarily…) diverse place, but I could take or leave the bafflingly numbered streets/avenues/lanes/courts and single-family houses.

I moved to Manhattan a few months ago, where I hoped to recapture my love of urban running. It hasn’t gone well. Too many cars, too many people, too many stoplights, too much street construction. Dodging walkers on the sidewalk isn’t fun for me, and it isn’t fun for the people being dodged. Central Park is very nice, but I’m bored with it already.

In retrospect, Brooklyn is the perfect balance for the urban runner. It’s dense enough to be interesting. Neighboring neighborhoods contrast sharply with each other. Cars – at least in the northern and eastern parts of the borough – are few enough (and deferent enough) to make it safe to share the streets. I miss it.

If you are a runner living in Brooklyn, fight the urge to stick to the well-trodden paths. I too love Prospect Park, and the Belt Parkway Promenade, and Brooklyn Bridge Park. But you should be out on the streets, because there’s no better place to run.

2013

· 5 Replies

Another installment in my year-end reflections.

In my 2012 post, I laid out a couple of things to think about during the upcoming year. I feel like I did a pretty decent job with at least one of them: turning off. This summer, my family and I rented a cottage and vegged out for a month and a half. I intended it to be a semi-working vacation, but it ended up being a barely-working vacation, and it was awesome. I also made some changes in the second half of the year that made me more mindful of getting sucked into work while on the go: I stopped using email on my phone, I got myself an OFF Pocket, and I’ve generally stopped carrying my phone so much. I started riding bike for fun around the city, and got back into a decent running routine (about 800 miles on the year). So, I feel like things are a bit more relaxed than a year ago.

Work-wise, I haven’t branched out as much as I’d hoped. I’ve got a few big deadlines in the next month or so, after which I plan to come up with an interesting project or two to shake out some of the cobwebs. If anyone is planning to do something really cool, let me know 😀

I continue to feel less and less connected to my old academic self. This is something I don’t talk about much, either online or in person, though I was recently persuaded by a friend that others might benefit from hearing about it. In the upcoming year, I hope to write more about this issue and other more varied topics than what I allowed myself in 2013.

Out with the old. Happy new year!