Topic Title

A question about something which has been puzzling and irritating me for a couple of months.

Since the spring I've been using my HR monitor religiously. I've assessed my AT rate (166-7) based on the average HR over the 2nd half of 10mile TTs; and I've made a point of trying to stick to the suggested ranges for all the sessions, especially long steady ones where it seemed my instinctive impression of effort was a bit on the easy side.

But what I find is: when a hill comes along, I tend to push on and the HR goes up, so I have to throttle back to stay in the zone. But when I ride into a headwind, after a little while I seem to ease off instinctively, and if I don't conentrate on pushing into the wind the HR soon drops out of the zone. Worse, even in the tailwind, the feeling of speed tends to make me ease off as well, so I have to keep checking the rate and pushing on then too.

On a long windy ride, it becomes a real mental effort to stay in the zone; the rate keeps dropping if I don't keep checking. It can make for pretty grim riding - although of course it's not *physically* exhausting because the whole point is that I'm not working as hard as I think.

Anyway: surely HR is all about effort (power), and effort is about speed and resistance, and there shouldn't be a big difference between uphill and upwind. It's just that for me there is - uphill means HR climbs, upwind means it drops.

Does anyone else suffer from this? And do you have any techniques for staying focused and on the right level of effort on windy rides?

tom

"Does anyone else suffer from this?"

Yes. I think the problem is that wind is almost always very variable. Consequently into a headwind you gear down to cope with the strongest gusts, and then inbetween these you're pedalling easy. Likewise tailwind - you gear for the lulls and then when you get gusts you get an easy ride and hence drop in HR. Hills are usually steadier - or at least easier to plan - but we always feel we can go a bit harder and hence push HR (or power) up. No-one likes seeing the speed drop into single figures and on steeper hills it's sometimes more comfortable to keep a reasonable cadence rather than let speed/cadence drop to give a "target" HR or power.