Originally Posted by Carbonfiberboy

Hope you do fine on your test.

Possible causes for your issues:
1) Chest pain can often be muscular discomfort, cramping, associated with breathing hard. My cardiologist told my that my chest pain, right over my heart, is nothing to worry about. He said that if something was wrong, I'd certainly know about it by now. Just an encouraging note.

There are at least a couple other causes for me, including some referred pain from some cervical degeneration and GERD. I have medical stuff in line to check out those possible causes. Mot of the time there seems to be no connection between the chest pain and effort. It is the combination of chest pain, the lag between heart rate and perceived effort, and some general tiredness that raises my concern.

2) When my HR lags my RPE, I know I'm tired. That's definitive. If you're posting here and climbing 7500' or so every week, yeah, you could be just tired. Do you upload your rides and watch your hrTSS, CTL, TSB, morning resting and standing HRs and orthostatic HR, any of that? Use an HRV app on your phone? You might want to do all of that. I betcha there'd be clear signals coming from your numbers which would set your mind at ease.

I climb between 6k &10k a week, depending on a whole range of circumstances. Climbing does not seem to give me the general feeling of being tired that I am experiencing. I monitor BP/HR every day and have a good handle on my HR at various times of the day, but I don't track any of the others you mentioned.

As we age, it's pretty hard to train effectively without keeping track of how our training is affecting our physiology. We can't just do anything we want, any time we want anymore.