Yesterday my morning resting heart rate was in the low 50s bpm, with excursions into the high to mid 40s bpm, so an improvement on the mid 50s bpm seen the day before. I did my long run of 1:50 h, 11.28 miles @ 9:46 min/mile and average HR of 138 bpm. I was tempted to go to 2 hours, but I decided to stick with my training plan in order to not overdo it.
This morning my resting HR was back in the high 50s bpm. I ran 1 hour and 6.44 miles, 50 min @ 9:04 min/mile and an average HR of 138 bpm, plus some paces for 10 min. I ran at 9 am, so it was hot and muggy...not so much fun.
The mystery of my elevated resting HR may just be that my training stress is ramping up. My polar HR monitor does generate a training stress curve, based on a simple (but still opaque...I'll try to track down the algorithm) time series model, that is shown below. First, training stress since I started running, then the last two months. Note that the graph does not show my last three runs, so the decline in training load at the end is not accurate.
This does suggest I'm raising my training stress sufficiently to raise my resting HR for the moment...though I'm not sure how this algorithm corrects for increased fitness, if at all (i.e. do I need to set the fitness level manually?), nor do I know if the green vs. yellow vs. red zone cut offs are correctly set (i.e. they are not at all clear where these cut-offs come from...). There is something to be said for the do it yourself approach.
Update #1: after a bit of poking around it looks like you need to set the VO2max level manually. I've currently set it to 45 ml/kg/min. Surprisingly, training stress seems to be scored proportionally to 1/VO2max.
But this doesn't seem right...endurace is determined by several important things beyond VO2max, which you could get into the algorithm with some simple lag structure, maybe with distance scaled by some function of HR. So maybe it's doing that as well...
Update #2 (July 19): resting HR of ~50 bpm this morning, with spiking down to the mid to high 40s bpm.
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