5.
Apr 21, 2008 10:56 PM
in response to:
kbidle
Re: Heart Rate Issues
I was like you when I first got into distance running. I was a sprinter in college and when I decided to try my legs at this marathon and distance running thing, I found out the same thing as you. If my heart rate wasn't 180 or above, from being a sprinter, I felt like I should have just stayed on the couch and done nothing. However, reading up a lot more and even trying it out, the heart rate monitor did save me and allowed me to run distance fairly well. The heart rate monitor for me slowed me down enough to where I could actually last more than 6 miles at a time.
Also, I got this from my PHYSIOLOGY book from college and I think it's cool stuff to know about the body. It says that for endurance athletes, cardiac hypertrophy is characterized by a large ventricular cavity and normal thickness of the ventricular wall. This means that the volume of blood that fills the ventricle during diastole is also larger. In anaerobically trained athletes the heart is usually characterized by a normal sized ventricle cavity and thicker ventricular walls. Therefore, although the magnitude of the cardiac hypertrophy in these athletes are the same, the stroke volume for the anaerobic athlete is similar to those of nonathletes.
This can affect your resting heart rate as well. The more time you take building your longer runs, the less your heart will have to work to pump as much blood to the rest of your body because it has such a huge ventricle to pump all that blood and therefore your overall effort will go down at the same pace. Therefore, in order to keep the same effort level, you'll have to go at a faster pace. This, of course, takes several months, even years of training though, especially if you are only going 2-3 times a week.
Hope that helped and I didn't lose you in the physiology jargon. Just interesting stuff to see what is actually happening with the body in such a workout routine though.
