23% Grade - Heart Rate Approaching DEATH - Help???

[Andrea]

Also, I honestly feel that your heart rate should not go above 190 or so. There are limits.

Maybe for you, but my average HR for a 4 mile time trial is 191. My max is 205, and I'm 26 years old.

220-age is just a prediction. Like someone said earlier, it's not going to kill you to be at your max, but it's not optimal because of the slight reduction in cardiac output. You can't physically sustain a max heart rate for long enough to feel serious ill effects from a reduced cardiac output, so, barring a pre-existing cardiac abnormality, there really is no danger in allowing your heart rate to get that high.

As your fitness improves, it's common to see a slight decrease in max heart rate. This goes back to the cardiac output thing- the better shape you're in, the more blood your heart can pump out with each beat, so it doesn't have to beat as many times per minute to move the same amount of blood per minute that it did before you started training. That's why your resting and submaximal heartrates decrease significantly when you go from being sedentary to well-trained. Max HR won't always decrease, and if it does, the decrease is not as dramatic as the changes seen in resting & submaxiaml heart rates.

[Di bear]

Maybe for you, but my average HR for a 4 mile time trial is 191. My max is 205, and I'm 26 years old.

Andrea, I'm not going by a chart. I'm going by what I "honestly feel" and the 190 is a ballpark figure. So, I think your 191 is perfect. If the goal is to increase stroke volume, which is what it really should be, then consistently getting your HR super high is not necessarily the way to do it.

I don't use a heart rate monitor because I personally feel that HR training is bunk, but that's just my personal opinion. I often climb at my "max" of 190 (I'll manually check my heart rate once in a while, especially if it feels really high and hard). I know I could go above it, but I don't feel it is necessary, and it could even become problematic. I stop and drink when my HR gets "too high." The heart is not the only muscle you're training. If your HR is getting that high, then it's your other muscles that are begging for mercy, not the heart. Slow down. Do an an endurance workout. Don't punish your heart because other muscles are undertrained. Your legs don't have to hurt to be working anaerobically.

For me, I prefer to keep my HR in the 160-180 zone. That is just where I am when I ride. If I go above that, then that is an indicator that I need to reassess my training and come at it from a different angle. Usually, that angle is endurance training. (Long, long, slow, hill climbs.) As stated before, I don't always measure, but I go by how I feel.

The reason why I thought of an arrhythmia is because I've seen a lot of them on peripheral vascular and carotid ultrasounds. They're not uncommon. You'd have a few normal beats, then a quick beat, then a few seconds of no beat. Something like that might throw the Garmin off. That's why an EKG may be a good idea. Get a baseline to know where you're at. It could be something as serious as a septal defect, or it could be nothing at all. Another issue is that it might not be your "true" max (I'm talking about the 212 and 225 HRs thrown out there), but tachycardia for whatever reason.

I've spent a lot of time with sick people, so I'm just cautious.