-
It's been so long since I've paced easy runs by anything other than perceived effort, so I'm not sure of the exact answer, but...
- Garmin metrics are often inaccurate
- your max HR might be higher than your current estimate.
If it were me, I would go out and smash a parkrun (or other 5k effort) which will (a) give you an actual 5k time to go off and (b) might record a new max HR. Perhaps the suggested easy run paces will start to converge?
- Garmin metrics are often inaccurate
-
As Phil said, doing a proper 5km effort will be much more helpful for calculating where your zones are.
There are lots of idiosyncrasies with zones, and zone training. The biggest one IMO, is that the benefits of doing z1/z2 might be negligible if you’re not doing many miles anyway. We chatted about this at the club, and my coach definitely supported the notion that if you’re not doing many miles a week, the 90/10 training ratio of low effort to high intensity, might not actually be that optimal.
Yes doing lots of miles and base building is great if you’re still left with enough miles to do some good utilisation training (and get the benefit), but with low mileage overall, z1/2 might not be worth it.
You are reading a single comment by @dst2 and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
PhilPub
Nef
@dst2
Pacing and heart rate zones.
I'm trying to get my running legs back and know that 'just going for a run' is not helping me so I have started to build my base by running with a hart rate of between 70% and 80% of my max HR. I have set my max HR with a couple of hard efforts on different days. This is forcing my to run at around 8min/km.
I'm not sure of my current 5k time but the slowest I have ever done one is 23min and I was in far worse shape. My Garmin is predicting that I can do a 24:15 5k. When I use that time in a pace calculator (the vdot.com/Calculator one) it is telling me that my easy pace should be 6:09 to 6:45 min/km. Physiologically I think I'm better suited to shorter distances (maybe even being relatively strongest at 400m or 800m). That may be a function of my preference and how I have trained in the past tho. I'm finding running at 8min/km uncomfortable (but getting less so with each run).
My questions are...
...is the difference between the pace calculator easy pace and my HR measured easy pace simply because I have no base and therefore I am doing the right thing building it from 8min/km upwards?
Or...have I potentially got this wrong therefore am running too slow and should look at another method of measuring my efforts (pace, HR zones based on LT or something else)?