I have been using my old wrist base garmin fenix 3 heart rate monitor for a few months now as a way to make sure I do not overdo my easy runs. It took a while to get used to the slower centurion pace plod. Quite often, I thought my garmin must be wrong, but usually, on closer checking of the data, it was probably right, and it was just taking longer than I was hoping for my body and legs to adapt.
They reckon that wrist based heart rate monitoring is not very accurate, but I think it is more than good enough for what I want. Just some general indication to back up the way I am feeling as I have just been so used to pushing through any discomfort in the past.
I suppose it is all about understanding how the garmin works that helps interpret how much attention I need to pay to it.
I have always known that the wrist based HR monitor did not work very well while swimming back in my triathlon days, everyone who had a chest strap. So it should not have come as such a surprise when my garmin went a bit haywire in the very hot, humid weather that was making me sweat profusely. It might have been raining and / or me swimming.
Either way, my garmin recorded me running very slowly in zone 5 and decided I needed 4 days to recover. Lol. As it was an easy run I stopped 3 times during the run and measured my heart rate manually just to make sure there was nothing wrong with me and each time I checked it at between 60 to 100 not the 165 plus that it was saying.
It was a bit disappointing to have garmin drop my VO2 max score from 46 all the way down to 39 but I will keep using the garmin wrist monitor as a guide and hopefully it will be back up again as soon as I knock out a faster parkrun time.
