Measuring fitness
Since I haven’t done any serious running this year, never mind in the past 6 weeks, I’ve been looking for a way to compare my current fitness levels to how it was late last year. It’s one thing measuring your resting heart rate, but there are more accurate methods.
Polar watches offer “Fitness test,” mine included, which predicts VO2 Max. How accurate it is, I’m not so sure, but it’s an indicator nonetheless, and should give me an idea. Well I did the test, and got a result of 55, which compares to a value of 60 I got in November 2006. According to this, I haven’t lost much fitness.
However, a few weeks before I had my operation, I suffered through a 5km time trial, although my ankle was fine, I could hardly walk the following day. I struggled to a disappointing 19:21, you can see my report here. You can see my average heart rate is 184 bpm. I thought it would be interesting to compare my HR to my PB 5km time, set on the same course.
Have a look at the graph below:
The top line is my HR from my recent time, and the bottom from my PB. My average HR was 6 bpm higher for the SLOWER time. And I ran nearly 80 seconds faster! That’s a clear indication of a drop in fitness.
So for the future, I plan to run the the time trials at the same pace, then watch as my average HR drops. Should make for an interesting test.
