After a well-deserved week off, I broke my respite to test my maximum heart rate--at least the one that applies to the run.
The process is simple, but not easy. After a warm-up, run as fast as you possibly can until you just can't anymore. This will typically be accompanied by your heart rate reading maxing out.
First things, first. Being a Sunday, the track was completely empty. Just me and my wife doing the photography.
It seemed like a good chance to use the panorama feature in the iOS6.
For years, many of us have been told that we can learn our max heart rate using this formula:
MHR = 220 - age
So for a 43 year-old like me, that would mean that my MHR is 177 beats per minute.
The reality was something else, however.
Not the kind of plateau thing to the right-center of the chart. That's the point where I was in pure hell loosing oxygen and feeling just awful. In other words, this was as fast as I could make my heart beat.
The first two laps were great, just a nice easy stride at 8:30 - 9:00 pace:
At the end of that second lap, however, I began to pick up the pace and when I came back around to this point, I was running at about 4:30 pace. See...I'm so fast that the camera blurred!
That peak number turned out to be 166 bpm. That's also 5 bpm lower than a year ago:
I'm a little surprised that I would be nearly 3% lower, but I also feel reasonably certain that I could not have pushed that number any higher. Believe me, I really tried!
There's always the possibility of testing again, but for the time being, this will serve as my baseline for my off season training which should be at at about 60% - 75% of the max or 100 - 125 bpm.
Since the bike typically produces a lower max, I'll test it in the near future as well and report those results.
For now, I have the baseline for my plan.
Thanks for reading!
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