Running at elevation with a focus on heart rate

This is the first time in my life that I have had a chance to try running at elevation ever since I transitioned from strength training to cardio training.

I've heard stories about it being more difficult at elevation and I know that it is true because of a trip to go skiing in Colorado many years ago where I got strangely winded just walking down the street.

This is my first time actually testing it though. The good side of this is that it is noticeably cooler at this altitude so I sweat less, the bad side is that I do get winded faster and find myself not gasping, but just needing more air at this elevation.

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This is gross exagurration of how high up I am but the pic does come from a quite interesting article about how running at elevation affects you.

The first day that I tried running at this elevation I just went for it and didn't pay much mind to my heart rate as far as my watch was concerned. I could tell when I would slow down that my breathing was far more labored than when I run at sea level in Chicago. I was considerably less hot though, even though I was running mostly in zero shade and in the dead of afternoon. This is wonderful especially when you consider that it is still September.

This time I focused more on keeping my heart rate somewhere I consider manageable and tried to stay in zone 3, but if I did cross over to zone 4, which happened a lot, i tried to keep it in the lower levels. There were certain times that my BPM spiked but this was the times that I ended up on a road with a lot of cars and well, this kind of made me nervous so I ran faster to get out of them. I guess that kind of screwed up my results.

But my body knows better than my watch does about what I find comfortable and aside from certain parts of this where was a barely visually noticeable incline, but still a very real one, it wasn't all that difficult for me.

It's funny because when I look at the map that came with this readout, the parts where I started to feel the most pressure was during those ups and the parts that seemed easiest were the downs even though you would really struggle to notice them at all with the naked eye.

My pace is nothing to get excited about here and it is actually slower than what I could do at sea level but the idea here was to regulate my BPM, not get done and dusted as fast as possible.

In the end I really feel like I could have gone further if I once again, had been able to carry more water with me.

This is about 30 seconds slower than my normal medium-level-difficulty sort of run of 5k or more, but I was sweating a lot less and that always makes me happy since in Chicago in summer I look like I jumped in Lake Michigan by the time I get back to my apartment.

I am only here for a few more days and think I will spend the time doing rather relaxed walks with my mom instead of testing my elevation theories for the next few days. I think that spending time with your parents is far more important than any exercise regimen.