Are Heart Rate Monitors Considered Bling?

I am readily irked by Fitness Nazis. I am readily irked by the way they dismiss things like reading books as being sedentary. "Oh, I don't read books; that's sedentary," they say, always with the supercilious smirk that transforms the word sedentary into a sword. One must spend one's time running up hills while wearing shiny underwear or succumb to the dread character flaw of being sedentary.

But having said that, events in my life have led me to suspect that I am maybe a tad too sedentary. In the last year about eight people where I work have suffered heart attacks ranging in severity from inconvenient to fatal. Many of them have been in my general age bracket, and I woke up one morning and thought "You know, that's a trend I believe I wish to buck."

But what to do about it? Running appeals to me about as much as a root canal. Rowing seems interesting enough, but rowing in the middle of the Arizona desert is made difficult by the complete absence of open water. I quickly realized that cycling was my only realistic option. I've always liked cycling, I enjoy exploring the world by bicycle, and it happens to be something that can readily be done around my house.

So I went to the nearest big box store and bought a big box store bike. I can hear the jeers of the real cyclists already they lower their heads and cough and shout "buy a real bike!" But at least I bought the best big box store bike I could find, a Mongoose Blackcomb. It's a pretty good bike by toy store standards. The worst criticism of it I could find in the cycling press, other than its provenance, is the fact that it weighs 37 pounds. Apparently that's a lot for a bike. But since my goal is tolose weight and improve my cardiovascular health, not win the Tour of California, the weight doesn't matter to me. When I lose a great deal of weight off my own body, then I'll worry about a 37 pound bike, and I look forward to the day when I can go to a real bike shop and whine "Man, does my Blackcomb ever weigh a ton! Got anything lighter?"

So I went out riding, and immediately hit the wall. I was pedaling along, huffing and puffing, and presently huffed and puffed myself into apoplexy. Heart hammering like the crankshaft bearings in my old Pinto, lungs wheezing and tearing like rotten sails in a stiff wind, legs burning, muscles locked up, head throbbing, stomach heaving. I was, in Sam Kinison's old phrase, starting to see dead relatives and heard voices saying "move toward the light, my son." It was devastating.

I parked the bike, collapsed, thought about it for a while, and reached a conclusion. "Cycling sucks," I rasped. "It hurts, I can't walk, my lungs hurt, I'm going to throw up, and it's going to kill me."

More out of a sense of duty than anything else, I read a few more cycling websites, searching for the magic phrase that would motivate me to mount the Machine of Certain Death one more time. Most of the websites strongly urged that one use a heart rate monitor, especially if one was interested in improving aerobic fitness.

So, feeling a bit like a fool, I went out and plunked down serious money on a heart rate monitor (a Polar F6, for those who are interested in nomenclature). I strapped the thing on and went out for a ride.

Man, what an education that turned out to be!

It turned out that cycling didn't suck. What sucked was my understanding of what aerobic exercise should feel like.

Just out of curiosity, I rode at my previous pace, mushing along until I reached that familiar state of near-death devastation. My heart rate was around 170 and the heart rate monitor was flashing so fast I worried that it was going to burst into flames. So then I started over and rode along, trying to maintain a target heart rate of 138. What a difference. My heart no longer felt like an angry cat trying to claw its way out of my chest. My lungs didn't hurt. My legs kept working. I could tell I was working, but I found that I could carry on a halting conversation if I felt like it (though it would have been with myself. The only thing freakier than a man talking to himself is probably a man on a bicycle talking to himself). In other words, it was a level of effort that I could maintain without popping like an overripe tomato.

In fact, it was hard to stay under 140. Even going along desert trails in low gear I tended to average about 144, which felt okay, and on the mild climbs around here peaked at 156, which didn't feel so good. To drop below 140 I had to barely poke along at a pace so slow people probably assumed that I was crawling on my hands and knees through the brush. It felt like cheating, actually, a level of effort so devoid of the usual rumpus of exercise that it seemed that I was accomplishing nothing.

We're always told to "go for the burn", to dig deep, to find hidden reserves of strength, to find the athlete within, and that no pain means no gain. Exercise is supposed to hurt. Pressure makes diamonds! It's supposed to be hard. We're supposed to grimace and fight and make tendons pop out in our necks, right? Come on, bust a hump, suffer purgatorial pains to make up for being sedentary! This cramp, that's for reading the whole Tarnsman of Gor series! That deep lung pain, that's for getting a job where you sit down all day! That lightheaded fixing to go meet 'Lizabeth feeling, that's for spending all that time trying to understand Larry Niven! Right? Right??

Maybe in some cases, but not in mine. As long as the goal is to lose weight and improve cardiovascular fitness, none of that hairshirt nonsense is apparently required. All you have to do is maintain your 80% target heart rate, and as it turns out, doing so isn't painful. Sometimes it's hard to actually go that slow. This was a major revelation to me, and I would never have had it without a heart rate monitor.

Now if I can figure out how to sit on a bicycle seat without hurting myself...