Heart rates over the years

I’ve been training with Runna for a year now and I thought I’d share some of my progress. Since March I’ve also been running for ten years, but not without breaks. My current streak on Strava is 57 weeks, though, which means I’ve been running at least once a week for over a year now.

My main takeaway is that I should take it slower. Most of your kilometers should be easy kilometers, which builds the stamina you need for the faster kilometers of the week. I guess I was already aware of this, but I just couldn’t do it. All my runs would be tempo runs at the least, and my intervals would just be me pushing myself even further for a bit, and then fall back to tempo run. Sure, I would fall back to lower paces after a while, but only when forced by heavy breathing.

This Monday, it occurred to me that my heart rate is indeed lower nowadays. I ran 5 kilometer in 26:50 and my average heart rate was 154 bpm. In my head I am still very used to seeing an average of – I kid you not – 188 bpm. In the past I just accepted that as a given: I am tall, so therefore my body might just work differently. I knew my maximum heart rate at the time was 203 bpm and I would hit it every once in a while.

So I dove in my Strava account and pressed some buttons and out came some graphs, for this month, for this month in 2025 and this month in 2024. I have tried to capture the graphs in handwritten HTML:

The improvement is enormous. Sure, I’ve grown older and with age your heart rate is expected to go down too. But I can also report the feeling. Monday’s 5k did truly feel easy, as if I were cycling, or taking a brisk walk. I am very pleased with this.