The Zone

I’ve been riding bikes for five years now and I’ve made a few improvements. About two years ago I hit a plateau both in overall fitness and in cardio gains. A friend of mine asked me about my heart rate recently and if I was riding in my zone. I told him hadn’t really focused on my heart rate—I just ride. The next time we rode I wore my heart rate monitor and we rode the same ride we’d been riding for over a year. He’s younger and in great shape and so his perfect heart rate zone is my “anaerobic” or not so perfect zone. Come to find out I’d been exercising ruthlessly wrong. I was riding hard and fast to keep up with stronger, fitter riders but not riding in the zone that was most conducive to me making fitness gains. Sometimes in life we have to exert less energy to make greater gains, sometimes we have to work smarter not harder, sometimes we have focus on our training rather than just keep doing what we’ve always done.