My New Toy - 03.04.2007

I just got back from training, and I have to brag about my new toy. I got my Polar RS800 heart rate monitor at the Ostersund World Cup this past December in order to show how high my heart rate was during the race for the enjoyment of the television viewing audience. Immediately after using it and analyzing the information, I realized what a perfect training tool it is and have done almost all my training and racing with the RS800 ever since.
One of my favorite parts of training is analyzing what I have done. Many hours have been spent looking at what effect which training has on the body, and the RS800 opens up a new world of analysis for me. I have always used a heart rate monitor in the past, but I had never had one which could download my heart rate levels throughout my training or race onto a computer. This is especially interesting for a sport like biathlon, where we race as hard as we can without overstressing the body in order to shoot well. Throughout the winter I collected the information just for reference, and it immediately showed very distinct trends. Now that heart rate information can be used to check my recovery, and how well I am handling my training.
The reason I bring this up now is because today after analyzing the heart rate data, it showed improvement (I was able to train at a faster pace at the same or lower heart rate). That gives me a lot of confidence that I will be able to control my training much better, which means this will be a very good season.


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