Gear of the day - Heart Rate Monitors

First to be reviewed, by virture of what I've used most recently, is the heart rate monitor. I've had three of these things and each one had a different level of complexity and served a different purpose.

The first one is the Polar FS1. This is the most basic monitor that I've used. It has a single button to navigate through all the functions. Think of it as a watch this is also a heart rate monitor. Count on it to deliver data from the moment and keep you within a programmed zone (user specified).

The second one is the Timex Ironman Heart Rate Fitness System
This is a classic timex ironman watch. Everything that you'd expect to see from a company that's been producing watches in this line for as long as I can remember. This model is the base of their heartrate/fitness line. Timex indiglo, synchronized transmission to reduce cross talk, and the chest strap round out this watch.

The third is my current pick, being the gear/data geek that I am. [Warning: Pricy] I wanted a product that would record my workouts for me as I am clearly too lazy to write this stuff down myself. I also wanted to have the ability to compare marker sets against one another. How does my body react over the same course at the same pace in varying weather/wind/and so on and so on. The Polar 625x & Polar 725x just give me the warm fuzzies when it comes to gear. Both are bike and run computers in addition to being heartrate monitors and watches. Both are capable of recording speed and distance from a shoe pod or from a magnetic pickup off the front wheel of your bike. As far as recording the data goes, each will record in varying increments (5/10/15s) depending on how much data you want and plot that data over time and distance, which is all viewable if you download it to your computer and in to the software that polar provides. For me this is perfect. The 725x goes one step further in that it also allows users to add on a power accessory to their bike which allows the tracking of wattage over time. For me wattage is cool, but not necessary at the training level. It has always seemed to me that that metric is a piece of lab data which is a measure of growth or a means of baselining over time but less useful than heartrate, speed, distance, or even altitude gain.

I prefer the polar system to GPS in that the accelerometer used in the footpod to measure speed and distance only takes one AAA battery and needs to be replaced rarely (twice for me last season). Though at a disadvantage to the GPS systems currently on the market by Garmin or Timex in that the footpod and the watch must be calibrated every so often, accelerometer based measurement currently used by Polar and Suunto is less dependant on weather conditions and urban geography, takes a smaller footprint on the athlete, and I've found to be less tempermental. But my voice is just one. Many athletes swear by them. In fact one of the things that I would have loved out of my system is the ability to overlay my routes on a real map, as I tend not to run in straight lines, or reliable courses. It would probably be akin to tracking the roaming patterns of wild animals... as they trek across Los Angeles... in running shoes... dodging traffic.

Both options yield significant amounts of information and it rests in the hands of the user to take or leave as much of it as is necessary. I have more to say on this, but for now these are the pieces that I've used and have loved.

For training for longer distances, nothing, and I mean nothing is more important than training in the correct heartrate zones. All right, I exaggerate a little. A heart rate monitor falls a close close second to a good pair of running shoes. But that's it. Run in sweats, a headband, wool socks, but bring the shoes and the heartrate monitor.
-dean