With all due respect to Don Johnson, I hate looking for a heartbeat. Truth be told I hate listening to someone lament about looking for a heartbeat, but it can be equally frustrating to estimate my own heart rate in the middle of an interval workout. Enter the Heart Rate Monitor (HRM). I bought a Polar S510 years ago and the batteries finally died last month. After talking to a customer server rep at Polar I know that my T61-coded heart rate strap is useless. Begrudgingly I came to the realization that it was time to buy a new HRM.
At this point some of you may be screaming "SRM" or "POWERMETER" or something about measuring wattage. You would be barking up the wrong tree. There are many reasons why I have not, and will not use wattage to measure my performance. The most relevant right now is that I am a Category IV racer. Training with wattage is well down the "cost versus benefit" list. If you want a more complete list, I will return to this rant in future posts.
After a lot of research I went with the devil I knew versus the devil I did not. Yesterday I received my new Polar Heart Rate Monitor (HRM). It is a CS200. I've used it for one training ride so I'm still figuring out the details. With that caveat, I have to say I'm not all that impressed with the CS200. My main gripe is that I can't program workouts. My old Polar S510 allowed me to program 4 different interval workouts. The CS200 has some mysterious Timer function. It allows me to set two different time limits and they randomly beep at me during my workout. Also, the device only allows me to set up a single heart rate range whereas the S510 allowed three different heart rate ranges.
Now I should say that I'm slow to pick things up, so maybe it has all the functionality I'll need as soon as I figure out how to use it. Most importantly, I'm happy to have a working HRM for my off-season training. Look forward to my next post where I ruminate about a trainer that likes to eat tires.
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