Half Marathon HR Zones

I apologise in advance if this is meant to be in a different section.

I have been training for the Coventry Half Marathon, using the one of the many amazing training guides that Runners World supply.

The training has been great, and since training with my Garmin and HR monitor, I'm seeing the advantages of using it. Although the training tells you what HR zone to train in, it doesn't detail what to do on race day.

It says that 85% of MAX HR is a good HM pace but does that mean I run at that pace through the entire race or is there some kind of split target I can do.

I want to use my Garmin and HR monitor on race day so I wanted to program it so that I can keep my pace in check.

Any help would be appreciated.

To be honest you are better to run to pace rather than HR in a race. You are going to ahve adrenaline on race day causing changes in your rate and while you might average 85% you will almost certainly get some drift so there is no point starting off at that pace. Once you have done a few with the monitor on you will have a better idea of what your HR does and you might then consider using it in the race.

Thanks for the advice. I will wear the the HR monitor in next weeks race and look at the data. What would be a good plan to run for a half marathon then?

Have you dont a 10k recently? If you have there are many pace calculators what will give you an idea of equivalent times. Otherwise it is hard to say what you should do. HM pace is just on the hard side of easy. It ought to feel fairly comfortable but you should still feel like you are pushing yourself a bit. Of course that needs to be sustainable too

I've ran a couple of 10ks, although trails, in 1hr 4mins so I'm guessing that for a half, at a push, I could do in about 2hrs??