what percent of max heart rate are the following paces: recovery, easy, marathon, threshold, v02max
what percent of max heart rate are the following paces: recovery, easy, marathon, threshold, v02max
Different people will give you different answers. I'll tell you what I know.
- easy running and recovery running are the same to me, and are less than 70-75% HRmax (more often closer to 60-65% for me, but that's just me)
- the average HR for a marathon in a well-trained runner will be 87-90% HRmax. It will start lower, and climb higher. Usually takes the first 10-13 miles at that pace to hit 87-90% HRmax.
- average HR for a less-trained runner will be lower, as low as 80-85% HRmax, for a marathon
- HR will not remain constant when running at "threshold" or vVO2max, and the numbers you see will therefore depend on how long you've been running that velocity/effort, rest between reps, length of reps, etc etc. If you assume vVO2max to be something close to 5k pace, you can sometimes see 100% HRmax at the end of a 5k race. If you're doing reps at that pace, you might see ~ 90% on the first, say, mile repeat, drifting up a little for each subsequent rep.
If anyone quotes you specific numbers and ties them to given paces (e.g. 90% HRmax = "threshold"), they don't know what they're talking about or are oversimplifying things for you.
Here is an excellent calculator based on heart rate reserve (HRR) rather than HRmax.