Today’s main session was a 10K piece done at steady pace with the goal of averaging 2:33.2/500m. There were three other sessions also done today. Altogether, a total of fore four sessions today. Only the 10K is shown here but that and all session graphs and data are available via this link to my online logbook. They are the log entries with the date of the respective sessions. To see their data & graphs click the corresponding “+” sign in the “Action” column for the session you want to see.
Because I’ve been getting so many “impossibly low” heart rate graphs recently from the Garmin heart strap worn on the chest, I was thinking about discarding it. But I decided to first try and see how a different chest heart strap would work. So I used a Polar chest heart strap instead of the Garmin today.
The results from the reliable Polar heart strap were just as nutty as from the nutty Garmin heart strap. So maybe the Garmin heart strap isn’t nutty, after all. I hereby apologize to Garmin for that mistaken jump to a conclusion. Average heart rate for data logged with each of the 1,438 strokes of today’s 10K was 28.8059805285118 (to the nearest trillionth or so). . . . according to the average generated by the spreadsheet. Of course, some of the heart rate data logged for each stroke of the 10K was when my heart (according to the heart strap) was flat-lining at 0. I don’t think it was really zero because I don’t remember any out-of-body, feel-sort-of-dead moments during the 10K. So the weird heart rate displays from Garmin AND Polar heart straps must be due to a heart that is weird and/or nutty. I’ve been having atrial fibrillation today. Call it weird, nutty or whatever you like but you can’t call atrial fibrillation “normal”. Guess the Afib has the heart-strap algorithm flummoxed.
There were two heart straps worn today, as I’ve been doing for a while. The other one was the Scosche with its optical sensor. Usually, the Scoshe heart strap gives a sensible reading. But today, though the Scoshe heart strap never displayed “zero” heart rate, it did consistently display “impossibly” low heart rate, except right at the beginning of the 10K. At the very beginning of the 10K before I started rowing, the Scosche displayed a heart rate of 113 BPM. That was my resting heart rate with atrial fibrillation. But right after I started rowing, the Scosche acted the same as the chest heart strap and displayed heart rate that was about normal resting rate or even lower.
I’m not going to even pretend that I understand the why for the strange heart rate readings, except I’m fairly sure it has something to do with atrial fibrillation.
Happy rowing to you!