I’ve not run for a while and I want to get back into it so tomorrow morning I’m starting again.

Monica had great success a couple of years ago using the training technique John L. Parker Jr. describes in his book Heart Rate Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot. While I loath the title of this book (and Dummies books and anything else that makes you admit stupidity prior to buying the book) it does come highly recommended.

So, armed with this book and M’s basic heart rate monitor I’m going to start this series about my adventures in heart rate training.

The idea with HRM training is that you can use the HRM to regulate fast and slow training days, alternating hard days with slow days, using the HRM as the arbiter of what is hard and what is slow. That means all running sessions are listed with a target heart rate as a percentage of maximum heart rate.

I happen to know, from previous HRM usage, that my max heart rate is 189 and later in the series I’ll re-evaluate that using a method from the book. I didn’t know my resting heart rate.

The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was strap on the heart rate monitor (HRM) and take my resting heart rate… no, I didn’t get out of bed or even sit up. The goal is to take a measurement of heart rate at its lowest or closest to perfect rest.

My resting heart rate was 60. I’ll take the measurement again tomorrow and start to get an average. Resting heart rate can vary day to day based on stress level, illness, quality of sleep or any number of other things so taking a few readings is handy to get rid of any outlier readings.

The book has a number of programs for novice through competitive athlete. I’ll be following the suggested scratch novice schedule. It is designed to get runners who haven’t run for a while up to the point where they can start one of the 12 week training programs.

I’m starting tomorrow with a 5k(3mi) run below the 70% recovery ceiling. The formula for working out what that means in beats per minute is:

(Max Heart Rate – Resting Heart Rate) x 0.7 + Resting Heart Rate

or

(189 – 60) * 0.7 + 60 = 150

So I’ll be trying to stay around or a bit under that.

I’ll let you know how it goes but I believe that these recovery ceiling runs are supposed to be embarrassingly slow.

Link to Heart Monitor Training at Amazon.com

Link to Polar monitors at Amazon.com

Link to index of all articles in the heart rate training series

Related posts:

1. Heart rate training day 1
2. Heart rate training day 7: a 5km jog
3. Heart rate training day 2: trust the system and just show up
4. Heart rate training day 3: walking…
5. Heart rate training: index

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