Quick post today. I enjoy being outdoors, cycling, sailing, walking or just nosing around. I also like to try to stay active. In the past I used a heart rate monitor to get my jogging up to 10 miles without collapsing in a sweating heap. The was done through LSD, that's Long Slow Distance and nothing to do with Greatful Dead albums. With cycling I am happy to hop on the trucker and head out for up to 25 miles without really thinking about it. After around the 30 mile mark I tend to grow weary, struggle on hills and try hard to eat. Sounds like I need to improve my endurance; LSD time! I have never tried proper training on a bike so today's experiments with a polar F2 heart rate monitor were a bit of a surprise.
I set a target zone of 65-75% maximum heart rate and then headed out for an hour to get an idea of what level of effort that was when cycling. Jings! I had to go slowly. I went down to Belhaven bay which looked lovely in the late afternoon winter sun. (oh for a fat bike). Once warmed up I pedaled along to East Linton. This is a flat route and I would normally expect to sit around 15mph and feel a bit of lactic acid in my legs at Tynefield and then it ease off as I got to East Linton and turned around to blast the 6 miles back.
Today I had the heart rate monitor beeping whenever I exceeded or dropped out of the training zone. This meant sitting at a gentle 10mph and sometimes less. It felt wrong but, 'trust your kit'. I'll aim for 1x1 hour and 1x2 hour cycle in this training zone each week. I'll keep a record here of any great improvements over the next 6 weeks. If nothing happens, then I'll have had a good number of relaxing cycles and there will be a heart rate monitor for sale, cheap, little used!
