I ran wearing my heart rate monitor today for the first time in ages.  Of course, I forgot to moisten the chest sensors enough so five minutes into the run when the watch was going from 60 bpm to 175 and back, I stopped, took off my shirt, smeared saliva on it, and off we go.  Real classy way to start an outing -- it’s a good thing we live on a back dirt road.

Back when heart rate monitors first came into vogue, back in the 80’s, I used one a lot for training.  Of course, then as now, the plain vanilla way to estimate maximum heart rate (so that you could then train at 75% or whatever) was to take 220 and subtract your age. (226 for women)  But it was well-known that the results were very rough and individuals could vary a great deal -- so it was good to calculate your personal maximum and go from there.  I remember doing steep hill repeats using ski poles and just before collapsing, reading the watch.  And then adding a few beats for good measure and going from there.   These days, it’s ok to try that in a treadmill test with professionals monitoring but my days of charging up hills to get a “do-it-yourself” max reading a long over.  I’m not aiming for a tombstone etching,  “His max heart rate was 160.”