Originally Posted by kellefson

I had the same thing happen to me recently in my first mtb race. I had thought my max was 189, but during the race it went up to 199 (I'm 34 years old) and I freaked out just like you did. I slowed down to let my HR recover and I ended up losing major time in the race.

I don't think that your racing HR is a good measurement of effort though, because my perceived effort during the race was not as high as my HR indicated. I think the extra adrenaline running through my body boosted my HR by at least 10 beats. I could never keep my HR that high during training.

So for the next race, I decided to go by perceived effort and I turned the HR display off on my Garmin. After the race, I downloaded my Garmin and was surprised to found out that my HR had hit 201 and I averaged 180 for 1:40! I was fatigued, but did not overdo it. From now on, I am going to leave the HR monitor off for my races and focus on perceived effort.