Hey,
I just bought myself a Garmin Forerunner 165. Immediately set up a Garmin Coach to help me go from couch to 5K. It schedules a Benchmark Run: 10 minutes in zone 1, 15 minutes in zone 3 and 5 minutes in zone 2.
Then I start the workout, only to realise half way through that the watch has set my resting heart rate to 74 and my max heart rate to 255. I panic, because suddenly zone 3 is 180 and above, and I have to keep it up for 15 minutes, and I've been overweight and sedentary for the last 10 years, I don't have that kind of stamina yet.
So I pause the workout, go into settings and adjust my min and max heart rates to 62 and 190 (estimates, but significantly closer to actual values), and finish the run with the zones recalibrated.
After the run, however, the doubt has crept in: Was the super high max rate intentional, was I supposed to run "all out", dying on the track in a fake zone 3 precisely to calibrate max heart rate and other parameters? Do I need to do another benchmark run?
