ACorn's Blog

I think if you take care of your goal of increasing to 60-70 miles/week, and hold it there for awhile, the endurance will catch up and the HR stuff will take care of itself. Maybe scale back a bit on speed as you adjust to the mileage, but stay in touch with it for sure.

Some people swear by the HR training, but everyone's systems are so different that going by feel (and not by the numbers) has always seemed to make the most sense for me.

My HR is always high...or it seems. I have determined that it is genetics and I have stopped wearing my monitor as often because it just made me upset to see a high number. With that said, I have seen improvements in my ability to lower my HR faster when I "rest" in between intervals.

Haven't read the book but you can see most of my runs are much, much slower than my race pace. I go off of the Frank Shorter legend. Hammer workouts and run with the slowest person in the group the rest of the time. Hope all else is going well. The 90F + 90% humidity = some tough running out here...

Adam, I like some of Phil Maffetone's work but the number calculations may not work for you because you may have a high max or a combination of the factors you mentioned above.. It does work for me however especially when I was very developed aerobically. And I think it's no coincidence that at the time this formula was presented, Dr Maffetone was working with athletes such as Mark Allen who at his peak could run in the 5:30-40/mile pace range at 80% mhr!

I think the key for you if you can afford it would be to get some kind of VO2 testing in order to get some more data that indicates where you are at physiologically and then work with a different formula. Follow that with some some good old body intuition. However, that being said I do feel monitors have their limits especially when performing key hard workouts such as intervals of course. But for recovery days or daily aerobic runs, if the proper data is applied, they generally don't lie my friend. In hot or cold weather..

Thank you all for the replies.

I appreciate all of the insights, I'm going to use my HR monitor for the next 3 months and see if I can make improvements at lower HRs.

You will. But make sure to include some short speed work also. Just advice from an old dog of a runner:} In the end you know what will be best for you. Just my two cents for what it might be worth man. Hope to run with you again sometime.