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

[Scarlet]

sometimes when I read the "technology" threads with heart rates and "what should be my max" i just get a bit naffed off. Surely when you cant get enough breath in your lungs and your heart is bursting out of your chest!!!! this should tell you your heart needs a rest!!!!! And if you want to puke .......well why on earth would you make your body work so hard that all it can do is throw up???
I do understand about getting fitter but one can measure this without a heart rate monitor... really
As you get fitter you go the same route faster and without feeling fatigued
also hills become easier to do
For me i dont want to feel ill after a good ride , I like to feel a sense of acheivement and that my body is still ok for example...
51 miles on Sunday in 4 hours ... oh yeh no puking and a good few hills Scarlet x

[ChickWithBrains]

I'm gonna go out on a limb.

I'm in the "your heart rate monitor was EXACTLY RIGHT" camp.

What does a quick spike on a HR chart mean? It means that, for the interval your HRM is set to (1 sec? 2 or 3? 5?), your heart beat really fast. Maybe you somehow got 4 into that one second for whatever reason. It only lasted a second, but your HRM picked up on it and you have a huge spike saying you were at 240 BEATS PER MINUTE!! But you weren't. You were at 4 beats per second, for one second. Before and after, you were likely lower. Who knows? Maybe you even had a PVC (a premature beat we all get from time to time for a huge variety of reasons) during that little window your HRM was listening.

The important thing is that it was not sustained, you had no repercussions from it, and you're listening to your body and your doc. Keep it up and don't worry about the little blips on your graph that don't seem quite right. No one has a smooth graph.

[Mr. Bloom]

well why on earth would you make your body work so hard that all it can do is throw up???

You're right....BUT....

Some of us come from an era where it was expected that one would push BEYOND their limits to excel. Just because there's bad info out there doesn't mean that attitudes change quickly with new revelations...confusion comes first

[lph]

And if you want to puke .......well why on earth would you make your body work so hard that all it can do is throw up???

and, well...sometimes there's somebody ahead that you really *need* to catch up with....

Not that I'm competitive or anything.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Personally, I'm with Scarlet on this whole thing.

[SouthernBelle]

crap, I just lost my post.

Mr. S, I remember you saying you were a masher. I have that tendency too. I'm working on using the whole pedal stroke, the entire circle. In particular, as my foot comes around the back of the circle, I push forward before I get to the mash down part. When I get this right, I think it reduces the effort required in climbs, and thus reduces puking.

I also think it will reduce the effort required in an entire ride. Hopefully somebody more experienced than me will tell me if I am on the right track.

You should have heard inside my head this morning. "Circle, Circle,..." I think that's why I missed a turn.

[Mr. Bloom]

I also think it will reduce the effort required in an entire ride. Hopefully somebody more experienced than me will tell me if I am on the right track.

I think I'm getting better, but I still struggle with IT Band pain at higher cadence. I am averaging a cadence in the mid-70's and still seem to have my most efficient speed for effort at that point...it still confuses me though since it's contrary to conventional wisdom.

[SouthernBelle]

My cadence is all over the place. Esp. since it's all rolly here. But in a charity ride last week I noticed a girl spinning by me on a hill I was dying on. It was about 18%. She probably had at least 20 pounds on me. That's what got me thinking about form over power.