howellhandmade

So a max HR of 200 is perfectly feasible. There's a range, and 220-age only goes so far. What is REALLY slow is largely a matter of perception. I've read a number of places that it's common for amateur athletes to overtrain by spending too much time in zone 3/4. They go at a pace that feels hard, but it's neither really hard enough to stimulate a training response not easy enough to recover. So they get the benefits of neither HIIT nor LSD, but just grind themselves into the same middling-hard rut. The pace that you feel is REALLY slow (actually, if your max is 200 zone 2 is sub-140) might be just what you need to fill in the aerobic dip in your powerband. The feeling that it is ridiculously slow/easy is exactly what those who seem to know say it should feel like. Or maybe you're just a 2-stroke and the best thing to do is have fun with it. I know at 27 I wasn't worried about my heart rate.