My Heart is Cooler Than Your Heart and the Experiment!

I have to make a quick addition to our series on Heartrate Training...

Did you miss it?  Read Part I, Part II, and Part III if you want to wow all of your friends with super cool facts on all things heart.

Remember when we talked about Max Heartrate, and all of the different ways to calculate it?  When I put my info into this calculator, it told me my maximum heart rate was 191. 

Imagine my surprise, when I looked down during the Beer Belly Two Mile Race a few weeks ago and saw

202

I almost crapped my pants.  Maybe it was the two dixie cups of beer, maybe it was the heat, or maybe it's because I was kicking some serious ass, but when I saw that number come up, I thought my heart was going to explode.

Lucky for me, it didn't, and it offered me a nice real-life example of why those heart-rate calculators can be totally bogus. 

Oh, and when I said all that stuff about max heart rate being genetic and not and indicator of fitness? Screw that, I'm going to pretend I have some super heart that would kick the asses of all the other hearts around.

Moral of the story - go out and do your own Max Heartrate Test. 



Coming soon...

Heartrate Training Part IV:  The Double Stroller Experiment

Here's the plan.  I'm going to run the same one mile loop on two days with similar conditions: once while pushing my kids in the stroller and once sans babies. 

Here's the catch. 

I am going to try to keep my heartrate in the same zone for both runs, and see what pushing the stroller does to my pace.

This is going to be fun.  Any guesses how much I'll have to slow down to compensate for the extra effort of pushing the stroller?