January 30: Heart-rate Monitor

My wife is much more into the fitness thing than I am. I give her credit, she's committed to her health...physically and mentally. It's evident in her eating habits and her desire to stay in shape, although her schedule, and the family schedule, don't always lend themselves to her being able to work out as frequently as I think she would like. Still, her head's in the right place. As a result, a while back, she had invested in one of those Polar heart-rate monitor thingys - with the strap that goes around the chest and the coordinating watch to wear while working out. My understanding is it does a ton more than just monitor your heart-rate, but I've never really looked much further into it than that part. As I prepared to take my 30-minute jaunt on the treadmill this morning, my wife asked if I wanted to wear her heart-rate monitor during my run. I immediately expressed little interest until she said "you would be trying something new" or a comment along those lines. At which point, I had no choice but to try it...you know, for the blog. So, I did. And, I can tell you, right from the start, it wasn't a good thing. First of all, it took 3 attempts to get the darn thing around my chest the right way; either it was backwards or I didn't have it in the right location. Once we were able to fit it appropriately, after my wife worked on it like some sort of fitness tailor, she then asked what my heart rate was beginning at. I said "71", and then came the comment which struck more fear in me than confidence...."71? That's your resting heart rate?" So now, of course I'm paranoid that I have heart problems of which I was previously unaware. My wife indicated that perhaps that's the natural rate for my heart and eased my tensions for the time being...slightly. Thus, I begin my run; well, walk and run to be completely honest. My wife tells me that I should get up a good steam and then quickly move to a slower pace and evaluate how quickly my heart rate drops in 30 seconds. I guess the quicker it drops, the stronger your heart. Meanwhile, this whole time the darn thing feels like it's slipping from around my chest and I'm more worried about properly adjusting it than anything else. Now I can understand how it must feel for a woman to wear a bra all day long. Jeez. Anyway, I go full-pace for about 5 minutes, then drop down to a cool-down in order to test the strength of my heart, And, guess what? It's not dropping too quickly. In fact, it seems as though it's not dropping at all. Maybe because I kept raising my arm every 2-3 seconds to glance at the watch. Throw in my increased anxiety over the desire to see a free-fall in beats per second, and we likely have our major contributors in the fact that it dropped so slowly. Over the course of my session, the speed in which it fell varied, and, afterwards, my wife did her best to reassure me that my heart is likely fine. But, the whole purpose of working out was to alleviate my stress and, due to the monitor experiment, that didn't happen all that well. The lesson? If you're not a big fitness person to begin with, don't go messing around with the tools of the serious fitness folk - it can only make you feel worse about your health.