Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Re-zoning!

Fear not I am not about to tear down your local quaint Main Street and throw up a 1,000,000sqft Mall! What I am talking about is changing my zones that I posted about here. After posting them Wes from A Code Geeks Tail asked where I got my zones from and I pointed him in the direction of the website…and this is why I love being a blogger and the community of athletes that I know, he immediately offered to work out my zones properly and suggested I follow the 20 minute test, of course he didn’t offer to do the test for me!

image Click on the image to go to the full article!

And of to the gym I went, there was no point in trying this on the road, I work in the foothills, it’s all up or down.

I set the treadmill at 1% grade and set off. A simple 10 minute warm up, 20 minutes at best effort without blowing up and then a cool down, average HR for the 20 minutes: 164.66, let’s call it 165. Not sure what the heart-fart is around minute 17 through? And I was surprised to see that I can still throw down some consistent  sub 7:00 miles, although it’s a ways off my 5k best pace.imageHere’s the GTC output, I emailed it off to Wes and overnight got the response…

image

Woot! Just as a reminder, here’s what I had by comparison to the new ones:

imageAs you can see they are a lot narrower in the spread and with the first three have a higher upper limit. I’ve reset my zones in GTC, on my 305 and in SportTracks and so now on with the show, Zone 2 here I come!

Of course none of this was possible without Wes, so a big Big HUGE thank you to him.  If you haven’t checked out his blog you should, self described as: “A Neo Southern Gentleman from the Heart of Dixie, navigating the silver waters of the IT industry, IT Consultant, family man, marathoner, triathlete, Ironman. Come dance with me as I train for Ironman Arizona in November 2010...”

So what are you waiting for…he asked you to dance!

4 comments:

  1. You are most welcome. You could have done a lot of running in your original Zone 2, and it would have been fine, but I suspect you would have felt more like the tortoise rather than the hare :-)

    Re-take the test every 6-8 weeks when you have a thirty minute all out effort in you, to make sure your zones stay dialed in. Also, I would find a track or a half mile loop or something outside to take the test on next time. Wind, humidity, and temperature all affect our heart rates.

    Good luck and have fun!

    Wes

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  2. I love that Wes notes his recovery zone starting at "0". LOL!

    I need to do this test on a run and bike to get a better idea of my true zones. I am just scared :)))))

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  3. That's very cool! I'm hoping to get a HR monitor over the winter and use it to a) build my base mileage intelligently and b) to follow a good race plan.

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  4. Wow. Nice post. This one is definitely favorited.

    It's probably been a year since I've tested my HR, so think next week I'll give this test a go.

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