Mistake or Master Plan?

Run: 5.1
Time: 50:25
Temp: 73
Quality: 7/10

So a friend of mine, Matt Teusink, inherited a Garmin 301 from a guy who got a Garmin 405, and Matt decided to hand down his Polar F11 Heart Rate Monitor to me. It is a very cool device and it's been fun to see how my actions and form during a run can affect my heart rate. Let's just say that I know for certain that efficient form + appropriate pace = good heart rate.

However, I am having one little challenge with the watch. It calibrates your VO2-Max (a super complex equation meant to make runner, bicyclists, and other athletes feel smarter than nonrunners - all it really says is how efficiently your body uses the Oxygen it gets) by looking at your resting heart rate, and I don't think that it does it accurately. Why? I spend most of my runs looking down at my heart rate of 144 blinking incessantly at me, which means that if I don't slow down and get my heart rate lower I'm about to die. After 35+ minutes on the brink of death, I start to get a little annoyed. There is a silver lining to my demise during my run. I seem to be burning tons of calories during my death march. Does this mean that I can go back to drinking more beer?

I know I can manually set the target range, which I'll do, but this brings me to the "Mistake or Master Plan" question. Freud once said that there is no such thing as a mistake. Meaning that we do everything (good, bad or otherwise) on purpose. When we got home from Newport Beach I realized that I left the transmitter for my heart rate monitor back in Cali. Doh! Did I leave that there because I'm stupid and absent minded or did I leave that there because I didn't like what it was saying to me? You be the judge. My wife leans heavily to the stupid side, but she's only one vote. Yes?

Now get back to work!