Posts

Showing posts from September, 2019

Why you shouldn't look at Strava's new fitness score

Image
"It pretty much makes no sense at all" Strava released fitness tracking for mobile devices to "summit" members in September 2019. Initially, this sounded like a great feature, however, they've decided to ignore fatigue..!?! Strava has had fitness and freshness tracking on the desktop version forever, and it's a great feature because it maps both fitness and fatigue. Yet, for some reason, Strava has decided to offer a far less relevant version on the mobile devices. My recommendation is to stay away from Strava app fitness. If you're interested in tracking your training I recommend using TrainingPeaks. Checkout my tracking fitness video here; https://youtu.be/OpvvWll87QU Listen to the training with heart rate podcast

Analysing My 8hr 38min 100km Run

Image
I had an amazing run at the Trail Trilogy 100km ultramarathon. Overall, I am incredibly happy with my effort and I am glad I implemented my 19-1 run-walk strategy, which I believe saved me on multiple occasions. HOWEVER, I felt like everything went to plan except for two sections. Looking back through my data, those two sections do stick out at me and I’d like to show them to you. Here is the raw output from TrainingPeaks, the software I use to analyse training files. To the untrained eye, it may look like a bit of a mess, but with a little background information, you can unlock a world of information. I’ll show you. Everyone slows down in an ultra First, if you clear out some of the excess data and only show heart rate and running power, you can see that I slowed down over the duration of the race. The rate at which I slowed down fits nicely into the results published in a 2004 study titled “Changes in Running Speeds in a 100 km Ultramarathon Race” (read here). The res