TN50 #67, My First Half Marathon Tracking HR Instead of Pace, 11 April 2022

Hi Team,

Happy Monday and welcome to The Next 50 #67.  I have been focusing on upping my Zone 2/Maffetone Method HR training the last few months and wanted to share my first decent test with decent data.  I was down in Texas last week and I had the opportunity to run the Outlaw Half Marathon, on Saturday, with a couple friends.  One of my running partners had a work requirement come up and ended up having to go to The Masters with clients – poor guy, but Elizabeth was still in it to win it – literally, she won her age group (Good Job E!)

I on the other hand had a brand-new Garmin 745 GPS Watch and Dual-HRM Heart Rate (HR) Monitor Chest Strap and my plan was to run the half marathon maintaining my HR instead of managing my pace.  I kept my HR between 135 and 145 beats per minute (this is my Zone 2/Maffetone Method HR – I think) for the entire 13+ miles.

Here is an article you may remember regarding avoiding the “Grey Zone” in your training, if you didn’t read it last time I included it, give it a read and you’ll understand my HR plan.  Based on my plan I was expecting to average between 10:00 to 10:30 minute miles, this was a guess because I had not been running with a chest strap HR monitor before this event.

Pix 1: Here is how it turned out:

Pix 2: Here is some of the data my Garmin collected, as you can see, I popped up above 145 a few times, I was trying to stay in the middle of my range, HR140, looking at my Avg HR I was happy with how close I stayed per Lap (Lap = 1 mile).

According to the experts when you stay in Zone 2 or the Maffetone Method on a run you will feel like you can turn around and run again, I was there, I felt fine when I crossed the finish line and could have kept running.

Next trial is to find a marathon and run the same HR zone to see how double the mileage effects HR Drift, I will also start playing around with fueling, I ran this half marathon with no calories, just some good black coffee!

Please share this with your team or anyone who might find it interesting.

Have a good one, Alex

2022 Murph Count: 44