Monday's Merchandise

Today's merchandise I'm going to rave about is my heart rate monitor. I do, I would say, about 95% of my workouts using a HRM and not using pace. Yes, I own a Garmin, but I only use it if Coach gives me a workout that indicates I have to do a certain pace and if that certain pace couldn't be done on a track. Otherwise, I estimate the mileage and do everything in heart rate zones.

The heart rate monitor I use is this Timex. The reason I like this one is it allows me to set intervals within certain zones. The watch will beep at me if I go out of the zone and when I need to move on to another interval in the workout. The thing I can't figure out on the watch or maybe it's not possible is that I can't set all 5 zones using the zones Coach has established for me. The watch has five zones that somehow are set using your max HR and then you can customize 3 other zones, which are the ones I use as zones 1-3 as established by Coach. But, with the interval settings you can manually input your zones and that's usually how I do it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not sure how heart rate training works, but it is highly effective and I am going to keep training with my HRM.