Today I ran considerably slower than I normally do. Somewhere around a 10 1/2 minute mile pace to an 11 minute mile pace. The reason you might ask? To put my heart back into it. About a year ago I wrote an article about heart rate training and the pro’s and con’s of heart training(there aren’t any real con’s).

This winter since I’ve started training for a spring marathon I’ve been doing all of my training indoors on a treadmill. I’ve monitored my heart rate but not actually allowed it to dictate my pace. The thing about heart rate training is - it will tell you what you’re really doing to yourself. You may feel fine but if a part of your body is sucking more blood or oxygen because of an injury or something - your heart rate will tell you. That’s what I did today. I made my time for running and was stronger at the finish even though the distance was greater.

Interesting story. Last year had a co-worker get a heart rate monitor. He put it on and started to watch what he was doing. What he couldn’t understand was that his heart rate was so high when he seemed to be running really slow. So he ignored it. Ran at a rate that was well above a training rate all the time. Needless to say he injured himself. Heart rate training was an interest of mine as well so I decided to get one and got a book about it at the same time. After reading the book it became very apparent what the problem with his training schedule was. I loaned him the book and suggested just trying to follow a heart rate directed training program. I’m not a doctor so I was going off of the book and articles on the web about it.

He followed a heart rate program for 6 months this year. No injuries so far and his actual pace is in line with what he was running before. The difference is that he allowed his heart to follow pace with his body. For a lot of people they can train consistently in a state where they are outside of their “training” rate. I can’t say the long term effects of that type of training but I don’t want to be the one to find out.