Zone 2 spin from today

Today's workout was a Zone 2 spin. As I noted in an earlier blog I planned the spin to be 90 minutes, with the intent of making it a full two hours to make up for the missing 25 minutes from Sunday's spin, and I did indeed make up that difference, and then a little bit more. Total workout was 2:05:00, not including an eight minute warm up, stretches, and a five minute warm down. This time, I was able to track my heart rate in real-time, and I'll tell you how.

First, remember that I have a Wii, and then I should tell you that I have the EA Sports Active 2 game for the Wii, including all the accoutrement that go with it. I had been looking at a way to use the game for the HRM, but hadn't really seen any easy way to do it; so I ... "hacked" it. Sort of kind of.

What I did was I created a custom workout of 38 consecutive sessions of "Mountain Bike" from the "Activities" selection, which is the maximum allowed (not sure if it's a time or a number limit, but I think it's a time limitation). Total, that amounts to about 59 minutes of workout time, give or take how long it actually takes to complete each "activity." I then did my warm up, stretches, put on the arm band (which is also the HRM) and the leg band, and started the workout. With this system, I was able to do about an hour and fifteen in actual time (I didn't stop pedaling just because the "activity" was finished and was loading the next), then when it finished I did a quick create on a new workout of 19 of the same activities (about 29 minutes of listed time), and finished off the workout (took about 45 minutes of actual time to do). I was able to keep pedaling in Zone 2 at the end of the workout when it shows the summary, and then did my warm down and finished.

All told, I was able to keep my HR in Zone 2 for about 2 hours and 3 minutes, with about 2 minutes spent in Zone 3. I never let it drop for more than a few seconds into Zone 1, and spent most of the time in the middle of Zone 2 (for me, Zone 2 is 130-143 BPM, and my average for this workout was 136). Felt good at the end, a little tired but not too bad. I was able to fuel with a couple of gels partway through and a bottle of HammerHEED, so I never bonked nor got hungry. Good times.