Heart Rate Racing & Training
As you lean into the climb up the mountain, your breathing becomes laboured, and soon you can no longer speak. At this point you are like a racing driver, redlining the rev counter.
A racing driver knows when to back off the red-line, but put an average driver in a highperformance sports car and she could easily blow the motor by pushing through the redline. It is for this reason that modern-day high performance cars have a rev-limiter, a builtin device that automatically cuts out the engine when an over-enthusiastic driver pushes too hard and too long on the accelerator pedal.
But as runners, we don’t have this automatic safety device. Instead, when we push through the red-line, our oxygen requirements become too large and we are forced to walk or stop, until we can again meet our oxygen requirements. It is never a pleasant experience, and in a race it can mean grinding to a halt, while other runners come bounding past you. We call it going into oxygen debt, and as we all know, debts have to be repaid…
A heart rate monitor can be a handy tool for training and racing, but it does have several limitations, and it is important to understand these. We are spoiled with gadgets such as heart rate monitors and GPS watches giving us pace and distance. But ultimately these are all just tools we use, and we still need to tune into our bodies and monitor
