Can his heart rate really be so high?

TFR ran again last Saturday for the ever-excellent Wimbledon Common time trial.

He also took a friend along with him - a friend who is much fitter than TFR and runs marathons in 3hrs 15, so he wanted to put on a good show, and hopefully beat his previous record of 29mins 40 seconds.

He had been running relatively hard throughout most of the race - running between 170 and 180 beats per minute, which is rather high against most of the normal criteria using the calculated maximum heart rate for a 34 year old of 186 beats per minute (the normal calculation is 220 minus age).

For the last 200-300 metres, however, TFR sprinted as hard as he could. When he got to look at his Garmin Forerunner after the race, he was surprised to see that his heart rate had reached 196bpm - way above his theoretical maximum.

This is going to have implications on how he trains - more on this in the next post!