Heart Rate, Old-School
What did people do before HR monitors?
It wasn’t that long ago. I was reading some stories from my book into audio and realized that in 2004 functional, wrist-based GPS systems were first getting adopted by the common runner.
What did we do before we had heart rate straps? We still had hearts, so we must have done something, right?
HR monitors existed as standalone devices but not too many people used them. They were not that good and were still pretty pricey for what you got out of them. It wasn’t until the heart rate strap was integrated into the GPS device that mass adoption happened. Even now, the HR functionality is second to the GPS information in usefulness.
I’m not here today to debate the effectiveness of heart rate training. I’m here to tell you that you have a built in heart rate monitor.
That’s how we used to do it. Short of stopping and pressing a finger to your jugular you trained yourself to know your heart rate by perceived effort. You can still do this. Tests have shown that experienced runners can tell you when they are crossing HR thresholds very accurately.
You can easily back into it from your perceived effort. I have done it both ways; with and without a HR strap. I can tell you what the equivalent is.
The other way to get and angle on it is by your breathing. If you can talk to the person next to you; you are HR zone 3 or less. This is a ‘conversational pace’. When you start breathing hard you are entering tempo-land and closing in on high zone 3 to low zone 4. It’s actually quite accurate.
If you look at effort take the 1-5 HR standard where 1 is walking and 5 is ‘about to keel over from effort’. How do you know what zone you’re in?
We’ll start with 5K race pace effort. This is pretty high effort if you are racing. This is equivalent to mid-to-high Zone 4 Heart Rate peaking into zone 5 when you sprint through the finish line and ‘keel over from the effort’.
So your 5k race pace is when you are working hard and breathing hard. That’s a zone 4.
The tricky pace is the Zone 2-3 HR. When I race a marathon I’ll start in HR zone 3.5 and it will creep up from there, but to run in a zone 2 I really have to slow down. Uncomfortably so. Most of my training historically has been in the low Zone 3.
In summary, you can easily find and learn the equivalent of heart rate zones by understanding the equivalent effort and breathing. All you have to do is listen to your body and understand the various signals it is giving you.
We just did it in the old days because we didn’t know better, but it’s a useful tool to have in your running backpack. All us old guys are in such good shape because we had to carry all those rocks and sticks to construct crude sundials for track workouts.
Rock on.