Before I started training, my total cholesterol was 360. It's genetic, my 87 year old grandmothers is 390. No heart disease in my family either. My doctor wouldn't even give me the hdl/ldl breakdown, he said at that level it didn't matter. LOL! I can't take the statin drugs either (lipitor etc) because I'm one of the very few people to get sides from it...
Now that I've been training hard and watching my diet close, taking a gram a day of niacin, lots of flax seed oil, etc, I'm running with HDL of 59 and an LDL of 160. My doctor is reasonably happy with that, for me. If I do lots of cardio, I can drive that LDL down to about 110, but who wants to do that?