A Passion for Running

Welcome to the home of Mark aka The Running Blogfather – a 40 year-old dad, husband and marathon runner who's beaten injury and is on the comeback trail!

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passion for running category: running on Monday, September 6 2004

You would not believe the trouble I’ve had with finding a Heart Rate Monitor with the features I want and that will last.

About a year and a half ago, I bought a Polar S120 HRM only to find that it cross-talked with other HRMs including Tom’s. That made it pretty much useless to me so I went back to the store I bought it at (The Running Room) and upgraded to the Polar S210.

I was really very happy with the S210 for the whole two months it worked when suddenly one day it just ceased transmitting so back to the Running Room I went.

I decided to give Nike a try since Aaron had been using and loving his Nike Triax 100 HRM. It was a beautifully styled HRM with really nice features. Aaron’s Nike was not available since it was the previous year’s model so I bought the one that was supposed to be it’s replacement but I got it home and soon found it didn’t record MAX heart rate. What the hell good is a HRM if it doesn’t record MHR? The RR agreed and took the watch back with no questions asked.

The manager (Sue) awesomely offered to find me Aaron’s Nike. Not only that, she lent me another Polar to take with me to the Kelowna Marathon since I needed something to keep time with.

Then, in late October of last year, I got my new Nike. I absolutely loved it and used it for a few months into the winter.

This spring I found it wasn’t working. At first, I thought it was a dead battery so I replaced it. That’s when I noticed the chest strap was cracked! Argh. After only six months I was outta luck again.

I felt bad about going back to the Running Room again so I put it off and did not use the monitor (other than timing features) all spring and summer. My plan was to send the strap to Nike and not bother the Running Room with things. That WAS the plan until this Friday morning when I woke up, went to put it on and the band broke off.

It turns out it wasn’t a broken band. It was the watch casing that broke. The high-tech plastic Nike used turned out to be not so high-tech and had just crumbled apart where the watch-band pins are.

I sent a letter to the RR head office, voiced my frustration and asked for advice. They said “come on in” and recommended I go back to using a Polar since they thought the quality was much better.

So, I did some thinking. I’d been considering purchasing a Speed+Distance monitor and now that my HRM was toast, it seemed like a good time to upgrade and combine two pieces of gear into one. The Running Room recommended the brand new Polar Running Computer. I did some reading and was convinced it was the way to go so I took the birthday money I’d been hanging on to since June and made the trade.

So there you have it. I’m on my 5th try this time but at least now I’ve got a great new training tool that I’m really looking forward to using!

I hope to calibrate the footpod today so I’ll let you know how it goes!




9 Comments

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Comment by Richard

Monday September 06, 2004 @

Very nice – does this one use a foot pod accelerometer? It seems like those are getting pretty popular – I do like downloading my runs into mapping programs though, so I may stick with the GPS for now. I’m just ticked that Garmin couldn’t add an HRM receiver into their Forerunner (they’re tiny, and the 201 is huge) for a true all-in-one.

I’m looking forward to your review though. I keep thinking I should add an HRM back to my training runs at least… that one is probably more than I’d want to spend, but hey, all information is useful.

745

Comment by Jon in Michigan

Monday September 06, 2004 @

Its very possible that Mark has superhuman sweat that dissovles plastic. :)

746

Comment by Mark

Monday September 06, 2004 @

Richard: Ya, it has the foot pod thing. Lots of nice features but mapping ain’t one of ‘em. Think I can live without that – for now! ;)

Jon: It’s the Italian grease in my sweat. I know a whole lotta people that just went, “ewwwwwwww!!!”

747

Comment by Chris Brogan...

Tuesday September 07, 2004 @

You held onto your birthday money since JUNE? Oh man. I’m a burner. I’ve already spent NEXT YEAR’s birthday money. (By the way, I’m using a Sports Instruments ECG2, and it’s so-so. I don’t recommend it).

749

Comment by Deene

Tuesday September 07, 2004 @

Do I need an HRM? When is it useful?

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Comment by Mark

Tuesday September 07, 2004 @

hmmm…

That’s a good question Deene. I suppose the answer is “it depends”. Don’t you hate answers like that?! I know I do! It depends on what your goals are and how serious you are about training and improving speedwise.

If you run for the pure enjoyment of running and exercise and are not very concerned with improving your speed, a HRM might be overkill.

If you train to improve your times and do quite a bit of intense work (intervals, hill training etc) and want to lessen your chances of OVER training, a HRM can be a very very useful tool.

Does that help?

I’m gonna ask Richard to comment as well since he is quite eloquent about training type stuff.

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Comment by Lesley

Tuesday September 07, 2004 @

Mark, I’d be interested to get a nutritionist’s point of view regarding the “lack of fuel” during a long run. Even the silver medalist in the Olympics (under a 2:30 finish) was fueling????

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Comment by Richard

Tuesday September 07, 2004 @

Well, since you asked…

I found a HRM to be more trouble than it was worth – a while back I lost the
strap to my Polar, and haven’t bothered to replace it. I think that it was
mainly due to the fact that after running/biking for a while, I had a pretty
good handle on my ‘subjective effort’ and it really didn’t tell me anything
that I didn’t know. If I tried using one again now, I wouldn’t bother
unless it had full PC data transfer capabilities at the very least, since
that’s the kind of information that might (not sure) be of more use to be.
Being honest about a potential toy, I wouldn’t see myself really changing my
behaviors when looking at it though, so from that perspective its not
terribly useful.

One area where I could see it being nice would be for intervals – there were
a few times when I would go out and run hard until a certain pulse (say,
175) then jog until it dropped again (say, 130) and keep repeating. That’s
a hard exercise to emulate without one, because its very easy to go longer
than you have to.

Having said that, I think that harder regular intervals (say, 8-10 400s)
where you keep going even though you know you’re not getting quite the
recovery that you “need”, and push past the point where your HRM would tell
you to take it easy (without being stupid about it), work much, much more
effectively. Especially if you’re with a group, so you know that if you end
up pushing that one-last-lap and feeling faint that you’ll have people to
watch out for you. At least, that’s what works for me.

On a long run, I’d class their information up with being able to map out a
run vs. just knowing your pace – fun, but by no means necessary. They might
be useful to track your improvement at running a given course at a set pace
over time (each improved run should give you a lower average HR,
theoretically), but most people are more likely to just run faster at the
same approximate effort, making the HRM not as critical and moving the
measuring device to a timer, which we pretty much all have.

Just my 2 cents (US).

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Comment by Mark

Tuesday September 07, 2004 @

2 cents U.S. is a lotta money over here Richard.

;)

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