The goal was to hold 60spm for 15min and hold 40spm for 15min
Potentially interesting bio-efficiency correlation. I need to get my fitness way up before I start drawing conclusions, but at my current level, it cost me 360 heartbeats to go 394 meters. I understand that it is way deeper than that, but I was surprised at the narrowness of the HR gap compared to perceived cardiopulmonary exertion.
Interesting results. You were certainly 'faster' at 160 spm but the increased heart rate indicates you were working harder too. I would be curious to know the results if you increased the cadence but kept the heart rate consistent with your low cadence efforts.
I mentioned my running cadence in an earlier post and another issue I had with that was that I found it difficult to increase cadence without running harder/faster at the same time. Watching my cadence and pace helped me dial it in and although it felt unnatural at first it soon became normal.
Don't overlook lower effort training as well. I was young and enthusiastic when I first got into paddlesport training/racing and thought I had to kill myself every time I went out. As I've gotten older (and less fond of killing myself during workouts) I've learned more and spend a lot more time training in zone 2. I find the training more enjoyable, I can train more often (don't need much recovery), it's easier on my joints, and even though most of my workouts are zone 2 I'm still getting more fit and faster in my quick runs/bike rides.
A big eye opener for me was that when I started running I just followed the daily running suggestions of my Garmin watch figuring it probably new more about running and training than I did. I was surprised how many of the runs were low effort. I was also a little frustrated because this was my fun new hobby and I wanted to run hard. But the watch kept me running slow with short bits of harder running mixed in every few days (something like a 10 minute warmup, 15 minute harder effort, and a 15 minute easy cool down).
As my fitness improved it would raise the pace for my "easy" runs and it started programming more hard effort and sprint work. Early this summer I ran an all out 5k and my time was 24:20.
Then some of my joints began hurting during the hard runs and it got really hot and humid so I backed off to almost exclusively zone 2 running for a little over a month. When the temp and humidity dropped again I did another all out 5k and my time had dropped by over a minute to 23:10. This despite doing virtually nothing but easy training runs.
I think I would have built much better fitness during my racing days if I had given more attention to more zone 2 paddling to build base endurance rather than doing 60 minute max efforts on most training paddles.
Alan
