Well done to the RC Almeria Entrants

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

How do I find what zone etc I should be working in - in fact what is a personal zone??

I feel hopelessly under-qualified to answer that question, but what I did was to simply use it for while, recording the results of my runs with the ave and max HRs for each run and each leg of each run, together with myown thoughts about how the run went. You pretty quickly get a feel for your "easy", "hard" and "$&#*ing tough" zones, which roughly equate to recovery, aerobic and anaerobic zones. Of course, if you can find out your maximum HR, you can use the zones given on any of a squillion HRM web sites. But I think they are designed for fit, young 20-somethings and don't match the real world of genuine RC runners.

At the end of day, HRMs give you a much better indication of progress than time, because you can relate your HR to every run, not just the ones where you went for a PB. You get back tired and shagged out from what should have been a moderate run, and are feeling pretty down until you check you HRM and discover your HR wasn't that high after all. And so on...

Um, which is to say, just use the thing and you'll pretty quickly discover your own "zones". It's loads of fun. And if you like spreadsheets, well, there's a whole new world of possibilities opening up for you.

Then again, you're probably a normal person, so I shouldn't have said that.

I'll go back into my shell now

P.S. Happy Birthday!