Saturday, March 13, 2010

Mending a Broken Heart Rate Monitor

Every year on my birthday I do a century; I suppose to help me stay in denial that I am getting older. My birthday came and went and today was the first time this month I had a 7 hr block of time to ride. It's raining and I am just not that hardcore to ride 100 miles in a cold rain.

I got up early and decided to go to a spin class before the girls woke up. I noticed my heart rate monitor died, taking with it a month of data. Before spin class I tried making one good HRM out of three broken ones. No luck. I have been using a Polar 720i HRM for 6 years. I'm on my fourth one. I keep getting the same model because I want to keep the same data base; there is something satisfying with graphing 6 years of data. Polar stopped making this monitor a few years ago. I checked ebay. No 720i HRMs. I think I had the last working 720i.

I went to spin class without my heart rate monitor. I rode hard but couldn't verify this by looking at my heart rate. And I won't have any data to save and graph. Frustrating. I need my HRM to validate my effort. I need constant validation. Quirk number 164 if anyone is counting.

4 comments:

  1. It's fun to look at the data after the workout. Sometimes I plop the files into Minitab and perform anovas and regressions in the vain hopes of seeing some improvement.... but then, stats can be manipulated to show anything we want them to.

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  2. Nope, there are still three working 720i's at our house. My husband is quite the devotee. I wish I could offer to sell you one, but that might not go over so well. Have you tried sending the broken ones to Polar to see if they can fix them?

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  3. 3!!! So unfair. I don't know why I didn't think about sending it to Polar. Since my post I got it working. Dumb luck really. Have you tried using the power sensor attachment? I was so fasinated with it that I kept crashing while reading the data. Ended up selling the power sensor.

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  4. I haven't tried it, but Adam borrowed one from somebody a few years ago. He said it didn't work very well. We both have power taps for our road bikes now, but I still use my Polar for mtb, cross, and the rare occasion when I run.

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