Wow. This post has been up for an hour, and no advice from the Holiday Inn Express. Amazing.

I didn't sleep there last night.

Max heart rates vary from person to person and are age-related.

There's a whole lot of discussion right now about what constitutes enough exercise from too much exercise. Heart rate monitoring might help sort that out. Maybe not.

This is my take on it: people tend to push it too fast, like riding 100 miles in a week because it's nice out and ending up with plantar fascism. Heart rate monitoring helps, I think, to slow you down when you want to go too fast.

So many will set a heart rate, something like 70-85% max and try not to exceed it, unless they really want to.

Which leads to a long discussion about LSD/base training vs. HIIT stuff.

I don't race. I'm not even doing club rides much these days, so the high intensity stuff doesn't make sense to me. So I tend to try to keep my heart rate below the 85% threshhold. For me, that's a heart rate of about 140 or so.

The racers and hard-core trainers are probably wincing over this post about now.