Running to heart rate

When starting out running I used to use pace as the one and only metric to measure my performance. The faster I was going, the better I considered myself to be doing. I found slowing down difficult and frustrating.

This lead to some results I was happy with over short distances but when it came to training for a marathon I ended up hitting a wall around the 35km.

Since reading about the 180 method I now target a particular heart rate, instead of a pace, for the type of run I’m doing. For regular day-to-day runs I’ll aim for a maximum heart rate of 180 - current_age. On shorter runs I’ll do 1-2km bursts at ~160. This proxy discipline was also a nice way to manage the transition of running in temperate London to tropical Singapore.