Running at max heart rate? (Read 221 times)

I am 30 years old and have a very healthy resting heart rate anywhere from 60-65 BPM.  However, whenever I run, it shoots up pretty much right away to high 170's up to 186 and will stay there for the entire duration of my 30-40 minute run.  Is it Ok to run at 180 heart rate for 30-40 minutes straight?  It's not like when I'm sprinting it gets that high - on a very moderate pace it is that high.  If I sprinted, it would probably be in the 190's.  Any advice appreciated, thanks!

Yes, it's OK. If you can do it for 30-40 minutes, it's clearly not your max heart rate, and your body in general will not allow you to run your heart rate hard enough to hurt yourself. On the couple of occasions where I've actually hit my true max heart rate on a treadmill test, I could only hold it for a few seconds.

a) as stated it is not your max heart rate  - after a short period of time at your max very unpleasant things start to occur.

b) as you gain more fitness you will probably find you have something in between.  Do some slower runs now and then.

Thanks everyone.

 

The problem is that if I ran any slower I would literally be walking.  I'm not even running that fast.  I would say I am running at a 12 minute mile pace.  And generally running is very hard for me so the entire 30-40 minutes feels awful - just generally uncomfortable the whole time (and I have done the insanity program for 60 days without feeling that awful).

Believe it or not, a 12-minute pace isn't all that slow; some folks "run" at a 17-minute pace (which is still faster that what is considered a walking pace of 20-minute miles).

As for running for 30-40 minutes straight, yup, when you're first starting, that can be very difficult indeed.  When I finally started working my way back into running following a six year layoff due to a badly broken leg (the fact that I gained some 60-70 pounds didn't work in my favor either), I couldn't run that long and I'd been a runner for much of the previous four decades.  Per my running logs I ran a whopping 8 miles during the entire first month, and trust me, those 8 miles were painfully slow and very uncomfortable.  My second month back at it wasn't much better, I managed 18 miles; they were still slow and uncomfortable, but hey, I did go more than twice as far. 

The good news is that within four months I had worked my way up to about 20 miles per week, and a few months after that I topped 100 miles in a month for the first time since the broken leg incident.  Now four years later (not all of which included running due to some severe work pressures) I'm putting in ten or so hours per week and logging over 60 miles.

Long story short, if you stick with it, running will become both easier and more pleasureable; I look back at those short painful runs during 2009 and am surprised at how much more it hurt to run a half of a mile back then compared to ten miles now.  Go figure.

your heart is a muscle, and it will adapt to the stress loads you can put on it; unless your cardiologist says otherwise.

Both Lance Armstrong and Secretariat had the same heart problem; a  hyper developed left ventricle.

The real story of improving your cardio skills is in focus to assure that your right ventricle is as strong as your left.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23470299

 

What exercises should I do to just work the right ventricle?

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