To quote Matt Fitzgerald's article exactly, "To spare athletes from these negatives, some coaches have come up with field tests to determine lactate threshold heart rate. One such field test is a 30-minute time trial. You warm up and then run as far as you can in 30 minutes. Your average heart rate in the last 10 minutes is your estimated LT heart rate. A comparison of this procedure to the lab-based LT test found that it was quite accurate. " The article can be found at this link on the website competitor.com
The bottom line is that results for the two methods - subjective 20 minute heart calibration and a 30 minute time trial- were not the same for me. They weren't even approximately the same. Therefore either I did the 20 minute heart rate calibration far too easy, or ... one or the other of the methods is not accurate.
Doing the Pear 20 minute heart rate calibration most recently, the result was 163 bpm, which was the highest Lactate Threshold Heart Rate it had yet calculated for me.
But doing a 30 minute time trial, the average heart rate for the last 10 minutes was 177.9. And I could have pushed myself harder because I had quite a bit of energy left by the time I sprinted during the last 60 seconds. In fact... the heart rate for this 30 minutes was probably a bit lower than it should have been because I had to stop for a half minute or so to reconnect my iPhone to Airplay music after it lost its connection due to an alarm reminder going off. If you look at the session report graph you can see a very noticeable dip in Watts and Heart Rate around the 12th or 13th minute, where I had to stop rowing so as to get the music going again.
So... which one is more correct? As Hamlet might say, "... that is the question."
This post is titled Crash and Dash because early in the first attempt at a 30 minute time trial, RowPro crashed and everything came to a halt.
That was somewhat frustrating but I thought, it was "just as well," because I really wanted some coffee and also... I'd forgotten to specify that RowPro divide the 30 minute report into 30 splits instead of the default 20. By specifying 30 splits, then there would be exact heart rate readings for each of the last 10 minutes, since each split would be exactly one minute.
So I made a cup of black coffee and also had a scoop of protein powder mixed with cold water. The latter was simply to act as a buffer and protect my stomach from the acid of the coffee, which always bothers me if on an empty stomach but is no problem if the stomach has at least a little foodstuff of some sort in it.
The break was about 30 minutes of drinking protein drink and sipping coffee, then I started another 30 minute session, making it as plain as possible. (The first 30 minute session which had crashed had been set up with a heart rate zone, pace boat and specifying a "RACE" start. None of those things were necessary for a solo time trial and I thought perhaps one of those might have had something to do with the RowPro software crash).
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| Finish screen for successful 30 min time trial |
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| Report for 30 min time trial |
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| Chart for 30 minute time trial. Notice the dip in watts & heart rate where I stopped rowing in order to restart the music. |
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| These are the "World-Ranked" workouts I've done so far this season. In the 8th line down you can see that my previous best this season was 7,084 meters in 30 minutes. |
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| In this view you can see that my 30 minute ranking improved slightly for my weight class and age group. But I still don't place very high, comparing against all those younger guys. |
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| This rankings list for 30 minutes shows only 69 year olds. I place better against only guys my own age. This listing includes ONLY 69 year old heavyweight guys. |
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| A view of the finish screen for the 10 minute warm down after the 30 minute "race". |
The next screen shot is only for anyone interested in seeing what a RowPro crashed screen looks like.
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| RowPro crashed. Crashes happen once in a while but not too often. |
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