I’ll immediately qualify by saying I’m 47, 5′ 4″ and over 14 stone – I know where the problem ultimately lies!

Below is the Endomondo screen from a training run for my first marathon at the end of September. It was 18 miles and the furthest I’ve ever run. Started off easy, my only goal is to finish, HR fine, feeling comfy. Stopped for a drink of water around 11k and on restarting my HR immediately jumps. (Although trail gets steeper it’s an old railway line so nothing major)

Any ideas what happened? HR slows down again at a second water stop at 22k. I assume I need to keep my HR in zone 2 as much as possible? I also took the opportunity to wolf down some wild raspberries around the second water stop. Was fuel anything to do with it? I’ve never used gels, is it something I should consider?

I quite often get a thing where my HR strap doesn’t make good contact during the first few minutes of a run and displays a HR about 40 beats higher than it should be. Might have been a similar thing and at the water stop it just got knocked out of contact a bit. The fact it that it also looks so ragged during this higher period also points to this.
This is my taper week for a marathon next week after nearly two solid weeks of training for it 🙂
Well done BTW!!

Dodgy monitor? Did it feel like you were working harder after your first stop?

Only other explanation is you drank 10 litres of water at the first stop and so were feeling the extra 20lbs of weight, and then had a very long pee at the 2nd stop to get back to normal

Maybe an arrhythmic heart beat, happens to me sometimes when exercising. Heart beat just shoots up by up to 40 beats a minute according to the HRM, but I think its just the rhythm confuses the hrm.

It seems to happen a hell of a lot less when I avoid coffee and alcohol.

You don’t say what GPS/HRM you are using.

After using my Garmin 210 (best bargain piece of kit ever) for about 9-10 months I started getting high readings, up to 220, which were impossible (improbable).

I changed to a polar strap, the Garmin sensor just clips on exactly the same, and the problem went away. I’ve used it for about 4 months now faultless so far. About 12GBP from Wiggle.

Might be this if physically you can’t feel any difference.

Matt

I’ve had that happen on training runs when the strap isn’t tight enough and it slips, eventually resorting to taping the damn thing in place for longer runs just to be sure I’ll get accurate data.

Other than that section, your HR looks good for the run.

Something is messed up with Endomundo there. Your total times for the run if you add up the top left chart are about 3.5 hours. Which for 18 miles is about 11:30 min/mile.

Yet the trace say’s you’re doing roughly 7 min/miles for 18 miles. That’s very good club runner territory for a long run.

I don’t think I’d trust any of that data. Especially given your heart rates don’t really seem to reflect your effort either. I imagine the run felt a lot harder than a sub-140 HR should feel.

Something is messed up with Endomundo there. Your total times for the run if you add up the top left chart are about 3.5 hours. Which for 18 miles is about 11:30 min/mile.

Yet the trace say’s you’re doing roughly 7 min/miles for 18 miles. That’s very good club runner territory for a long run.

I don’t think I’d trust any of that data. Especially given your heart rates don’t really seem to reflect your effort either. I imagine the run felt a lot harder than a sub-140 HR should feel.

This guy has got confused about miles and km (look at the units on the left hand side of the endomondo graph, they say mins per km).

The heart rate thing, unless you noticed it, chances are it is that you knocked the strap at the first stop, then knocked it back at the second. Unless you felt like you went off faster, you would notice the difference between a steady 130 and doing anything that would make you spike up to 180. Stop scuntling your nipples every time you stop and it might fix itself or use a different strap, or gel it, or put cold tea on it, or lick it before you start, hundreds of different things people try to fix that. If you zoom in on your heart rate data, you can see a bad vs a good dataset pretty easily by the jumpyness.

Thanks for the feedback. I was using a Wahoo Blue HR strap connected to my iphone. Looks like a bad connection is the likely explanation although I did think I was working harder after the water stop it didn’t feel that much harder.

bensales – timing is ok, it was roughly 7 minutes a km, it actually took me 3:45 – I’m just slow! 😀

:-). Serves me right for not zooming the image. I guess because I work in min/miles I just assume everyone does.

If you take into account your strap not quite connecting, then the graphs are pretty much in sync. I would expect the jump after the first water stop, as when you stopped, your HR went to rest, you then tackled a climb. So it went up. You again stopped before a flat, so it dropped, and then came back lower for the last part.

Good luck with the marathon. Which one are you doing?

I’m doing the Loch Ness marathon

It’s supposed to be very scenic. I hope so – I’ll need something to take my mind off the pain…………………… 🙂