3/2 – Half Marathon Training

Waiting until noon to run? Madness, I say!

Being a dataphile and a consummate geek, I wore my heart rate monitor to bed so I could check my resting heart rate when I woke this morning. I wasn’t going to be jarred awake by the alarm due to the late opening, so it seemed like as good a time as any. The results were pretty phenomenal. My RHR is currently 45 beats per minute. That’s pretty solid in the athlete zone!

The only positive I found to the church forcing the Y to stay closed until noon is that I was able to go out and deal with the Snowpocolypse – 3+ inches of fresh snow as well as packed ice from the earlier storms. Shoveling the drive and hacking at the ice sheet was actually a decent upper body workout. Silver linings, I suppose.

Then it was finally time to go run.

2/25 – Half Marathon Training

First of all, greetings to everyone from Matt Fitzgerald’s Twitter and Reddit’s 90 Day Challenge! Feel free to share, comment, or subscribe – let me know what type of content you are enjoying or would like to see.

But on to the running. Back to the track, ramping up the mileage – that is the nature of this week.

Got up with the alarm and had my ritual cup of coffee, said good morning to my wife and then headed out the door for another trip to the ridiculous 1/16 mile, banked corners track at the Y.

But, good news for this morning’s run! Garmin came through and got me a replacement heart rate monitor unit for my failed HRM. Since it was still under warranty, it was a fairly seamless process. Garmin really did a good job with customer service on this. I am glad to have my HRM back for this workout – I am addicted to data.

He’s Dead Jim: An Obituary for My Heart Rate Monitor

I am a dataphile, and one of my favorite things to track is the data from my runs. One if the best purchases I made was the heart rate monitor to pair with my FR210 GPS watch – it let me track my heart rate, set HR zones for training, & calculate caloric expenditure.

But lately my HRM has been flaky. If you look into the Garmin Connect links at the bottom of my training posts, you can see the heart rate graph is very spiky. This means there is a problem with the monitor. This was confirmed by Connect giving me a caloric burn rate of only ~50 calories per mile, a roughly 50% drop for no discernible reason.

Being an ex-IT grunt, I set about troubleshooting. First the easy stuff – I checked the connection posts, I ensured the pads were damp. No joy. Okay… next is to replace the battery.

This is where our story starts to go south.