My HR monitor called me a wuss this morning...

There is a nifty feature on the heart rate monitor Darlene bought me recently called the OwnOptimizer.  It adds a little more science to something I've been trying to track in a much less sophisticated manner using a stopwatch and how I feel.  By measuring (with a stopwatch) my HR laying down, then standing up, and determining if the delta is larger than my baseline difference of 8 beats per minute.

Now, the OwnOptimizer test tells me whether I have recovered enough for my next training session, without me having to guess and interpret.  The OwnOptimizer recovery test is an easy and reliable way to determine whether my training program is optimally developing my performance.  Training too easy doesn't get you to the level of fitness you need if you want to compete, and overtraining is worse because you are more susceptible to injury and you're not getting any faster.  In order to do it right, you need to stress your body and let it adapt through recovery.  The balancing act is to overload your body enough to force physiological change, but not so much that you damage it beyond it's ability to recover, or spend so much time training that you don't allow it to recover. 

Many athletes agonize over the right balance, but more importantly, identifying when they've overdone it.  The dead giveaways are chronic fatigue, chronic illness, injury, depression, or elevated heart rate (per my primitive test first described).  The problem with the unscientific test is that these symptoms become apparent over an extended period of time and require lots of recovery.  This new test allows me to run it a couple time a week, and make immediate corrections.

It measures five different parameters during a six-minute test (still laying and standing).  It keys on resting HR, standing HR at peak, standing HR at base, HR min and HR max, and the time it takes to vacillate between the extremes.  It returns a 1-5 result signifying (1) well rested, (2) recovered from last session and ready to hit it again, (3) need to train easy today to allow for recovery, (4) you've been well rested for a while, so you need to pick it up some, or (5) you have been training too hard and need to take a couple days off entirely to recover.

Since I've been building a low-intensity base to start off my new training season, I have expected it to provide a baseline of 2 readings.  To be expected because I haven't been hitting the workouts very hard, just going to a very long time.  I have been racking up lots of 2s over the last three weeks.  I figured the measurement this morning after yesterdays 90-mile ride would probably yield a 3, but I got the spur in the form of a 4. 

"Hey you slacker, you need to do some training."

So, looks like I have a significant base built and can start to try to adapt some of those type IIb muscle fibers into type IIa through higher intensity workouts.  Looking forward to injecting a little more pace...