Aiming Low - Wednesday the 11th of May, 2011

After the hard 10k-er in the "barefoot" shoes, my calves were singing. Well, I guess it's not quite fair to blame it all on the barefoot shoes, since the calves were also sore when I started that flat 10km from the very hot and hilly run the day before that. So, anyway, after two hard 10km runs in the previous two days, my calves were sore. They were "if-you-run-on-thurs-we-WILL-cramp-during-climbing" sore. So, an easy run today then, rest on the day of climbing and hopefully a more serious run on Friday.

Getting my gear together for the run, I'd forgotten to bring any method to carry my camera, so just decided to ditch it. In fact, I rather enjoyed the more continual effort of this easy run over the stop-start of my normal "run and shoot" style jaunts. Perhaps I might leave the camera behind more often, and try to come up with some imaginative content for the blog. Anyway, today I thought I'd post the type of data that I'm currently getting from my Garmin for each and every run.



The standard route map and elevation plot. You can see from this that it takes a while for the GPS to get a good latch on exactly where I am. My real position is offset by tens of metres until about 2-3km into the run.

Then there's timing/pace, elevation, heart rate and cadence information all taken directly from my Garmin "connect" workout log:




Firstly, you can see how much the elevation plot here differs from the GPS plotted (and corrected) data above. The other data has varying degrees of usefulness. I find that the pace and cadence information is quite useful in real-time, to gauge how much efficiency I'm getting out of my perceived effort. The pace is especially useful for this, and I constantly keep an eye on my current pace, and the overall pace for the run. Unless I'm trying to beat a specific time or previous PB for a specific run, the overall pace of the run is much more important to me.

As I get more used to my HR numbers, this too is becoming a good indicator of how my run is currently progressing, and in fact, because of the quite hilly routes that I normally run, any of these metrics are fairly useless in isolation. Sure I have targets for specific things, eg. aim for a cadence ~90, keep my pace faster than 5:00min/km, press my HR towards it's max in the last km of my run, etc; but it's only looking at all the information that the character of each run emerges.

Sorry for the late posts, I'm aiming to catch up soon!

See you in the hills!
~ Joe


PS. I almost forgot to mention the reason for this title! During both of my last couple of easy runs, I've been aiming to keep my HR as low as possible, without compromising my speed too much. My goal was to keep my HR under 160 for the full run, but as you can see, the final little hill climb was enough to press it to spot on 160. Doh! Will have to try easier next time!