Quote:
Originally Posted by chassis
Wow, pretty high (good?) heart rate. I'm not sure my heart rate has ever gone much higher than the 130s-low 140s and I consider myself in pretty good shape. I generally do steady, moderately strenuous activity rather than bursts of high intensity.
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When I started cycling and needed to set my heart rate zones, I used the standard formula of 220 minus my age and got 160 as the max heart rate. I found I easily exceeded that without trying too hard. On hills I'd regularly hit 180-190. So I used 190 as the max and just let the zones adjust from there. It's pretty accurate as I'm usually in Zone 3 for comfortable riding and Zone 4 if I'm pushing it, like I was on this ride. At my current age, using that formula my max HR would be 157. If I used that, virtually all my rides would put me in Zone 5 (Anaerobic) for the full ride. That just wouldn't be true.
I've been bad about keeping up my riding for about the past 6 months, so my HR was higher on this ride than it would have been a year ago for the same effort. So yeah, I'm slipping out of my previous level of fitness and need to halt that slide. I did an identical time on this Fulgaz ride back in February before I started slacking off. My HR was quite a bit lower. Fitness is an unforgiving boss. You need to keep at it or you lose it quickly.
