I had planned to share my excitement about running Mt Baldy this week, but the run didn’t go quite as I had hoped. I was going to ignore my heart rate monitor and just have a fun 10 mile run with 4000 feet of climbing. I have run much or all the way up Baldy many times, and I expected Monday to be just one more successful summit. But the 2 plus feet of snow that fell in the high mountains around us on October 23rd was still lingering up high. There was a packed route through it, but above freezing temperatures made the route sloppy and slippery. I hadn’t brought my spikes, and I reached a point about halfway to Baldy that was dangerously steep and slick. That’s where I turned back. At this age, not getting injured is always a key consideration. Baldy will still be there when the conditions improve.
While I was climbing I found that I couldn’t free myself from the clutches of my heart rate monitor as easily as I had hoped. Maybe that’s a good thing. I have always found in life that if you want to get good at something, you have to be dedicated. A part of your focus is constantly on the thing you are working towards. In my case, right now, that thing is improving the fat adaptation of my mitochondria, and as I have written in earlier posts, that requires lots of slow running with a focus on heart rate.
Since I can’t expound on the pleasures of my run up Baldy, let’s discuss the relationship between breathing and heart rate. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in recent runs. I always knew that when breathing intensity increases, heart rate increases with a slight lag. Through experience and reading I have discovered that the relationship between breathing intensity and heart rate is weaker than I understood, and it is a key reason that staying in zone is so difficult—breathing often isn’t a good gauge for heart rate.
One of the reasons I have been focusing on the connection between breathing and heart rate is that Dr Luks (see Training Log 4) and other internet sites I’ve been reading, note that a nontechnical way of determining whether you are in Zone 2 is if you have the ability to breathe through your nose while running. I find that I am generally able to do this, but that my heart rate varies across a wide range while I am breathing through my nose.
The training sites that I have discovered do not discuss heart rate variability or the correlation between breathing and heart rate so I decided it was worth searching elsewhere.
This Garmin site provides two useful insights. (https://www.garmin.com/en-PH/blog/critical-relationship-between-respiratory-rate-heart-rate-and-cadence/) First, on average, the ratio between heart beats and breaths is 4:1: that is, 4 heart beats for each breath. However, this relationship is highly variable. A graph on the web page shows the output of a runner’s heart rate and breathing: heart rate climbs slowly and steadily in the figure, while breathing varies dramatically. I marveled at this graph. Thus far in my training I have been unable to keep my heart rate in a tight range. I assumed that the athlete whose data is represented in this graph was more experienced at zone running than I, and was likely on a treadmill. A more technical Nature article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38058-5) studies the coupling between our cardio and respiratory systems. It notes that these systems are distinct physiologically, but that they interact, with heart rate being more variable than breathing.
This is consistent with my own experience. Say I’m running up a hill. My breathing increases. I think, I’d better slow down, my heart rate must be increasing. Often, it’s not. Sometimes it’s actually decreasing. I speed up. It takes a while to get my heart rate to start to climb once it has started trending downward, so I push harder. By the top on the hill I’m in Zone 3 and I’m walking.
This happens all too often, but I am getting better at understanding the I have to stare at my watch that much more as I start up hills, I have to speed up if I see my heart rate start to decrease, and I have to slow down in advance of reaching Zone 3. It doesn’t always work, but I’m getting better at staying in zone.
This is the best solution I’ve come up with thus far to keeping my highly variable heart rate in zone. It is just one more challenge of zone training, but given the heart benefits, as I discussed in my previous post, and given that it is becoming a part of running psychology, I will continue to forge ahead.
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