November 20th 2020
of 75 minutes. No problem, as I ran for that amount of time already a couple of weeks. However this was the first long run following my heart rate. And then of course... equipment fails... I brought the girls to school and then didn't manage to get my HR monitor to work. I went home (700m farther) and with the help of P managed to get it working ("Have you tried switching it off and on again?" - as in
The IT crowd).
But going out and running, it failed again. It kept saying I was in zone 4, which I very obviously was not, then after 10 minutes it went below zone 1... also obviously an erroneous measure... sigh...
Fortunately, I run with two watches, so I used our Swim2 watch to keep my heart rate under 135 bpm. Finally, after 50 minutes or so, the heart rate monitor seemed to start giving the same bpm (more or less) as the Swim2 and the last half hour I could use that one again.
Lessons learned:
- Wet the heart rate monitor before going!
What probably happened is that the heart rate monitor should be made wet such that is has the best conduction with the skin. I always hate doing that, because it is so cold on the skin, but I’m afraid I cannot escape it next time...
- Check if it works, before starting to run!
Otherwise, a lot of energy goes wasted on frustration about malfunctioning equipment.
- Wear long pants for a long run in autumn/winter!
This has nothing to do with the heart rate monitor, but I now discovered that running in heart rate zone 2, means a speed of around 8 km/h. This is pretty slow and even today while there was no wind and around 10 degrees C, my legs got chilly. So next time: long pants.