Being held back?

In the last 20 months I went from not running at all to running 10 k races. I’ve seen progress in distance and a little progress in time, but it’s slow. This is mainly because my heart rate doesn’t go down. Normally you would expect your heart rate to go down over time when you fitness increases, but mine doesn’t seem to change. This also means that it’s really hard for me to become any faster, since my heart rate still gets too high and I have to walk to get it back down again.

This also means that it becomes harder to participate in races when my distance increases. Race organizers set tougher time limits per km when the distance increases. Thus, it becomes hard, if not impossible for me to find a race further than 10 km of which I’m able to make the time limit.

I’m trying to explore my options and see if there are any 10 mile races with a 2:30 time limit or maybe a half with a time limit of over 3 hours. But it’s difficult to find anything, also because races are not very clear about what their time limit is on their websites. I often have to email them to find out, which I do not understand. You can easily add a sentence with your time limit to your race website.

I guess I just have to keep looking. If you know a race with a lenient time limit, let me know.