Be Still My Beating Heart

My week of relatively easy running after the Detroit half-marathon ended yesterday with.....a dispiriting fizzle.

On the books was a 2-hour run with my heart rate under 150 beats per minute. My right hamstring was sore, so I was happy this one was to be so easy. But sometimes "easy" isn't "simple." From the beginning, my heart rate refused to stay below 150 if I was doing anything that resembled jogging. I'd run a few steps, the heart would zip up to 160 or above (regardless of whether I was going up, going down or running flat), I'd slow to a walk, the heart rate would plunge back into the 120s.....and this went on for the whole two hours. There was no shuffle that wasn't a walk that didn't provoke the 160-plus reaction. Yet I couldn't walk fast enough to keep it in the 130s or 140s.

Here's what it looked like. Not fun.

At first I thought it was a problem with my Garmin heart rate strap (I use the Forerunner 210). Often when I start a run, my monitor will show impossibly high readings (like in the 180s or even over 200) when I'm barely out of the 11-minutes-a-mile range. Since this is a known problem with Garmin heart rate straps, I tend to ignore it, and it smooths out. But when it never settled down yesterday as it usually does, it became impossible to ignore....and though I may be wrong, I decided to trust it, decided that my body just didn't want to run much yesterday and did A LOT of walking.

Now I'm second-guessing that and wondering if it wasn't the watch or the strap after all. I'm going to try some of the tricks I've read online for fixing this problem, and we'll see how tomorrow's easy run goes.

Either way, this isn't exactly how I hoped to launch the "marathon-specific" portion of this run-up to the California International Marathon. I guess I was due a return to earth after last weekend's high. If this is the worst thing that happens to me over the next five weeks, I'll be grateful!

Has anyone else had problems with your Garmin heart rate monitor? Any advice?