Running- Trouble Recovering HR after Hills

How did you arrive at 150-167 as zone 2? That looks more like zone 3.

This has happened to me, and I can usually trace it back to lack of sleep or fatigue from some other activity from which I had not recovered.

Like Don said, if there was a purpose to your workout, like you were supposed to get back down to Zone 2 after the hill...just slow it down.

If this is a repeatable event, you need to listen to your body. It doesn't recovery because a) the hill intensity was too high and/or b) the recovery intensity was to high and/or c) other factors were at play like sleep, dehydratoin, stress, caffiene, etc.

How did you figure your zones?

That's my zone 2 as well(155-167). some of us just run high.

I run high. Used Friel for my zone settings.

The run was supposed to be a long, slow distance 9 miler with a fast finish. For reference, my paces are (typically

Z2/easy training- 9:00-9:30 miles
Z3/marathon race pace- 8:00-9:00
74/ mile repeats- 7:30-8:00
Max HR/5k pace- 7:00-7:30.

I'm thinking more and more that the heat (75 degrees) + the grade of that back hill just led to fatigue. Hopefully I can keep it down going forward!

That explains it. Friels' zone 2 is zone 3 :-)

If I push it too hard too fast, my HR will take a bit longer to come down and will also increase faster than normal if I pick up the effort again. However, it has to be a massive effort for this happen. Perhaps you pushed yourself harder on that hill than you thought? And yes, heat can be a factor.

Well that would probably depend on how you design your zones and then the correct zone would depend on your workout purpose.

Shane

Can you expand on that? What test did you do?

using paces for training zones is fine if most of your running is in same conditions and same surface. Doing a flat run on a firm, asphalt surface on a cool day leads to different pace than the same effort run on a hot humid day with rolling hills.

If the workout purpose is easy zone 2 and it's a hot humid day on rolling hills, run by effort, stay hdrated (pre-hydrate) and run EASY up the hills so you do'nt go passed the point of no return. It's possible you'd get much more out of a workout on a day like this by walking the uphill, maintaining your easy effort on the flats then adding the fast finish when planned.

with the caveat...there are many ways to skin a cat who is training for triathlon.

Not sure if this could be the issue, but my HR monitor will show abnormally high readings until I work up a good sweat. I wet down the monitor before a workout but once the fabric of a technical T starts rubbing on the monitor it will sometimes show 200+ when I am jogging along.

Did you feel like you were in Z3-Z4 when your HR showed that high? If you felt like you were in a high zone then the previous advice of slowing down is the best.