An Athlete’s Heart Rate – The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Different Strokes for Athletic Hearts,” by Gretchen Reynolds (Phys Ed, Science Times, April 9):

I am a former international distance runner and competed for Britain in the 10,000-meter event at the 1972 Olympic Games.

The efficiency of a trained runner’s heart compared with that of a sedentary person has been understood for many years and is well documented. This characteristic of the “trained heart” is prevalent in middle- and long-distance runners (rather than in sprinters), because, as the article indicates, of the aerobic nature of the training that they do.

Ms. Reynolds’s reference to a runner’s heart rate hovering around 50 beats per minute is on the high side. When I was competing, nearly all the hard-training middle- and long-distance runners I knew, or knew of, had a resting heart rate of about 40 (mine was 42).

What most of us can’t know for sure is the extent to which the cardiac structure with which we were born affected our ability as athletes in our prime. For example, I have no idea of my resting heart rate in, say, my early teens, before I trained as a distance runner.

David Holt
Bayonne, N.J.