What is your heart rate telling you?

Yesterday's workout did not go exactly as planned. And it gave me another lesson on listening to my body. I checked my resting heart rate in the morning and it was slightly elevated at 55-60 BPM. This might not be too much for a normal person, but as you probably know, endurance athletes have pretty low heart rate. I checked my heart rate several nights ago and had 48-50 BPM in the evening when it is higher than morning after waking up (before you get out of bed). This is definitely a metric I need to concentrate on. Ray talks about it in his post on how to measure it and I can add the Instant Heart Rate app that I tried out today, it seems to be working pretty well. To add you more information, I also searched back for an article from the Runner's World on 10 signs you need a resting day. One of them is:

Source

Yep, I should have known something is off. But I had a really bad night mare, I cannot share it, but it was really freaky and left me feeling upset, angry and sad at the same time. So I blamed the night mare and went on with my day. Ate my breakfast, wrote the wrap up post about my week and headed off for the first training of my new weekly plan from The Coach. Not an easy one, 10 half mile repeats at 3:25 each aiming towards 3:20 for the last ones. As I now know, the pace is 6:50 - 6:40 min/mile, this is the fastest I have ever done until now.

My repeats went as follows:
1. 3:17
2. 3:23
3. 3:23
4. 3:23
5. 3:25

6. 3:27
7. 3:28
8. 3:24

I am supposed to go down to 125 BPM between each of the five repeats and to 115 BPM in at least 3 minute rest interval between the two sets of five. As you can see from the Garmin splits table bellow, it already took my half minute more to recover between the 4th and 5th repetition. After the 5th repetition, I had trouble getting my heart rate down to 115 BPM, it took me over 5 minutes, whereas normally I would be bellow 100 BPM in the 3 minutes I am supposed to take the rest. My 6th was slowest so far, so I made a deal with myself to go really fast in the 7th and 8th and call it a day after 8 repeats. In the 7th I had a feeling like going really as fast as I can and I was even 1 second slower, bummer. I motivated myself for the 8th, but knew when finishing that I cannot cross the 3:20 mark again that day. Going to the Garmin graph, I barely reached 180 BPM in the last three repeats even though the effort felt really hard, this can be another sign of being tired ...

BTW new Garmin connect feature, you can get these detailed graphs
by clicking on the double arrow in the right top corner.

Got home really tired, called The Coach, explained the situation and got thumbs up from him. Giving me either total recovery day off for today (Sunday) or an easy 5 miler for recovery. Given my resting heart rate was elevated again in the morning, I choose the day off option. I slept until 10:30 am in the morning, went to bed to sleep again in the afternoon and am ready to fall asleep now at 11 pm. I guess my body really needed some rest. Thanks to the iPhone app mentioned above, I am planning on adding my resting heart rate to the metrics I follow to know where am I with my fitness and recovery levels.

Any similar experience, remarks, advice???


Update based on Blondýna's comment: yep, the elevated resting heart rate can also mean you being sick. I am secretly ignoring this option by adding lot of vitamins and immunity boosters such as fresh ginger tea and echinacea drops.