fitness

Weekend workouts raised Sam’s heart rate a lot and a little

Sam B

This weekend I raced in a short distance duathlon,  I took Cheddar and Nat’s dog Kirby on a 5 km dog hike along with Sarah, Susan, and Gavin after the duathlon (good to keep moving, right?) and I went on 50 km social bike ride with Sarah and David the next day that ended in coffee and cruffins.

In the 217 in 2017 Facebook group I participate in each counted as a workout. But they’re very different workouts and one way you can see the difference is by looking at heart rate data.

Here’s the bike course of the duathlon:

The runs looked pretty much the same except for the short bits where I took walk breaks. Yikes. Hard work.

Here it is on my Garmin. The Garmin is a more accurate heart rate measure. It uses a chest strap rather than a wrist band.

The course starts with a hill and you can see that looking at the heart rate information.

Average heart rate: 153, Max heart rate: 166

Here’s the dog hike, by comparison.

And here’s the 50 km bike ride.

Here’s what that looked like on my Garmin.

Average heart rate: 117, Max heart rate: 150

I’ve written before about training using heart rate information. See here on why take it easy.  See here on why go hard.

Do you pay attention to your heart rate when working out? Why? Why not?

Published by Sam B

Philosopher, feminist, parent, and cyclist! Co-founder of Fit Is a Feminist Issue, co-author of Fit at Mid-Life: A Feminist Fitness Journey, published by Greystone Books.

6 thoughts on “Weekend workouts raised Sam’s heart rate a lot and a little”

  1. After tracking it daily for a while (about 8 months), I spot check heart rate for different activities from time to time both as a way to check up on my rate of perceived effort and as part of my calorie management. A few years ago, moved to a place with much more extreme seasonal weather, and it’s been kind of a bummer to see what that’s done to my fitness, to be honest. I have found HR patterns to be a decent sentinel for general state (e.g., some coordination with lab results). I was on a medication for about a year that left me with a bunch of weight gain and a worse cholesterol profile, and you could definitely see some of that disorder in the HR tea leaves leading up to those annoying test results.
    I think the key with a lot of this quantified-self info is to have the stamina to learn how the many pieces interlock and what constitutes normal variation. Bodies, vast or othersie, contain multitudes.

    1. Oh also once on a long bike ride, during which I rarely reached 160, in the last few minutes an attractive person fell in with me and chatted me up a bit. My HR spiked into the 180s when we started speaking (on a leisurely flat stretch) and dropped back down abruptly when I peeled off for the last quarter mile home. So that was entertaining!

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