Opening weekend in Belgium is here, as I type this Omloop Het Nieuwsblad is taking place and my favorite 6 weeks of cycling kicks off.
In other news back in December I was having issues with my Polar FT7 heart rate monitor. The battery in the transmitter was fading and needed to be changed. I'd changed it too many times to count so that the cover was pretty messed up and this was the last attempt for this particular back. When I contacted Polar about getting just the battery cover I was told it would be better to send it in for a $13 service, which would include the battery cover.
Well that's all well and good but I wasn't sold on the idea so I figured I'd just run without a heart rate monitor. Using a treadmill (or dreadmill as I refer to it) means that my running is static. The pace and gradient is always the same so I thought I was all set.
I ran through January and into February. I had a slip now & again & again with the NSNG but overall I was doing good. In fact at a follow up GP visit I found out that since 28 December I had dropped 17 lbs even with slips. That was great news, but somehow I felt that maybe I should've done better and I blamed it on the food I ate that I ought not to have.
Now it is true to some extent that the food I ate that was bad would've been "okay" had it been a once in a while. But most times it wasn't. I am trying though.
Well I finally decided to try again with Polar. I'm at heart a thrifty Yankee (but not a Yankees fan - they suck). And the thought of paying $13 just to get the transmitter back with a battery cover seemed wrong.
Whenever you deal with customer service you either get the super helpful person or the person who'd rather stick to the script/ not give away the farm. The second time I called Polar I got the former and thus got the battery cover for free. It arrived Tuesday.
Wednesday was a fluke day here in New England. Temperatures hit a high of 74 degrees F and I was not going to pass up an opportunity to ride in jersey & bib shorts. My first cyclo-commute of the year and my earliest ever was this passed Wednesday.
My running schedule is M-W-F and it wasn't until yesterday that I got my heart rate monitor back into use. And what did it tell me? It told me that I had run my way out of zone 2! In December when I still had it in service I was doing a 4.5 mph pace to stay around 140bpm. My z2 max based on age and being a bit fitter than most is currently 143bpm. Yesterday I was in the low 130s - high 120s bpm. Sigh. With a bit of pace increase I got my heart rate to 138-139 bpm right where I want it.
Long story short, I feel almost revitalized regarding my work outs. Yes I know exercise is not a good way to loose weight and that diet matters more. But knowing that I wasn't doing enough work makes me feel good because now I have the other part of the equation as to why I wasn't losing more weight.
I recently got some new wheels and with temperatures here expected to be in the 50s; I should be able to get out and give a shakedown today.
