I took Jeff’s advice and ran on the treadmill to give myself a easier surface on which to run.  Its good advice.  While I don’t particularly care to run indoors, the surface is more forgiving on my knee.  I wore my HRM strap today.  The cool thing about my Polar HRM chest strap is that the treadmill at the gym actually picks up the signal and displays my heart rate on the console.  I don’t even have to wear my watch.  I had a pretty good session.  I didn’t push too hard.  My goal for now is to build my base.

According to the HR formulas, the aerobic zone for my age is 127 bpm.  Honestly, it is not difficult for me to hit 127.  Shoot, my heart rate spikes way over that when they flash Nancy Pelosi’s face on Fox News.  All the articles say that one should not be tempted to go over the aerobic zone (127 for me) while base training.  They say just stick to the program and it will make me a better runner.  Heck, I could not keep my HR below 127 no matter how slow I ran today.  Further, my knee is still having issues so I don’t have very good running form.  I tend to favor the knee and run with a sort of unbalanced stride.  I am sure that alone is good for a few more bpms!  Anyway, I feel more comfortable running around 135 – 140.  According to the MAX HR formulas, my max is supposed to be 167.  Of course, the generic formulas are not accurate.  Last summer when I was running quite a bit, I sustained heart rates above this number.  I know the only way to get a good number is to go and get cardiac stress test or a VO2 Max test.  I suspect my max HR is really around 178 to 182 (just a guess).  So I will be building my base using RPE, although I will wear my HRM just for correlation.  I am tempted to go balls to the walls on my bike and see if I can top out my HR and sustain it for a while to determine my max.  I am not sure that is a good measurement, but it is probably better than the general formula.

Here is a self test for finding my max HR…