I watch my cadence (shoot for 90-100) but don't have a power meter. For the bike leg of my first full IM, I'll be focusing on maintaining my heart rate below 80%. Is this still too high? What percentage would you pros recommend? I don't trust my self-perceived effort & boy do I want to participate & finish w/a sincere smile on my face.
I watch my cadence (shoot for 90-100) but don't have a power meter. For the bike leg of my first full IM, I'll be focusing on maintaining my heart rate below 80%. Is this still too high? What percentage would you pros recommend? I don't trust my self-perceived effort & boy do I want to participate & finish w/a sincere smile on my face.
Thanks for your input.
If you mean 80% of max HR, no. That's what I do but not what you should. Think more 65-70% unless you are an extremely well trained athlete.
In my first (and only) IM I was at around roughly 75-80% of my LTHR (probably around 70% of Max HR, though I don't know with any reasonable precision what my Max HR is), and that worked out pretty well. This is partially guessing, since conditions during my race were very different from (=much cooler than) conditions during testing and training (which is something to bear in mind,...)