As someone who shies away from the concept of making myself run 'til I'm sick to determine my maximum heart rate, I've been pondering how to get a good estimate (without the unreliable age-related formulae), and I've had a thought. I'm certain that this thought must have been thought a million times before by a million people but.....
Can we assume that over, say, a 10K race that everyone (or everyone who's giving it everything) will be working at a certain average percentage of working heart rate (this percentage will depend on race distance - less for longer races)? If we can, and we know our resting HR, then determining our max HR is trivial. Isn't it? Or do people race at vastly differing %WHR?
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Simply run up a steep hill twice with all you have then you measure your HR.
If you have time to think about your HR in 10k then you know that you don't run hard enough
:-)
I spotted my max whilst doing the St Ives Dairy Crest in CAMBS on the hill up to the airfield.
By the way, I never go to St Ives as I get nosebleeds from the altitude. And it's almost Huntingdonshire anyway. ;-)
Do a maximum test if you want to know MHR
1 mile - 98-100%
5km - 90%
10km - 85%
1/2M - 80%
marathon - 75%
I've found that these figures are about right for me. For the last mile/km of a race i ignore the monitor and just give it all i have left.
Chaos, did you spot that one of the medics on staff is a DOCTOR SPEED!... brilliant name in the circumstances.
So the formula is self-consistent. I reckon my actual max is more like 192 or so, so that doesn't fit so well (especially when I think that I could have run both races a couple of beats higher). Those figures are more useful (for me) for saying "if I can run a half at XXX heart rate, and reckon that was flat out, what should I go for a 10K at?". The answer seems to be about 7.5 beats higher, and that's quite useful for someone like me with limited racing experience. I don't wear a heart rate monitor for all my races, but I do find it useful in some to make sure I'm keeping the effort on - I either plan to run at a particular heart rate.
I read recently that MHR falls very little with age if you keep training