The reason for my brief hiatus from cardiovascular workouts was because my old Cardiovascular monitor watch (A Polar M21) was really starting to frustrate me. Sometimes once or twice a minute it would lose track and suddenly instead of the heart rate of 145 it was registering moments ago, it would think my heart was beating 76 beats a minute. This kept getting more and more frequent. I could make it stop by holding the watch a couple inches away from the chest strap but it still took a few seconds to correct itself and that tended to mess up both my pace and the watch statistics for amount of time in-zone.
Finally reading the FAQ on the Polar website I discovered that this was a sign that the battery in the chest strap was failing. They have a rated life of about 2500 hours of use and I'd certainly had mine at least that long.
Well, they don't make the model M21 anymore, so the closest to that currently is the M32. Now I get to go through the fun of getting the watch to figure out my fitness level and give me a in-zone range that's a challenge.
Right now the challenge is staying down in the range that it's set for me. Ok, I figured that the top range was going to come down. Apparently my old watch didn't increment my age as time went by so it still thought I was in my late 30s, so a the top range didn't decrease.
According to my age, a heart rate zone of 65 to 85% of my maximum heart rate is.. 220 - my age, so 179. 65% = 116.35, 85% = 152.15 which is the range my watch used the first day. But it does have a function called "OwnZone" that is supposed to be able to determine a narrower range than that from your heart rate's activity during a warm up period.
I'm no longer sure I plan on using the OwnZone function and may just set it to go by my age. I felt like I was really slowing down a lot to stay under a max of 147. And I have no clue why it brought the top end down that much. We'll see what happens with a few more attempts.
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