So today was supposed to be a nice relaxed run with a friend, I use a Stryd (wind) power meter to help me quantify my effort and analyse my performance / inform my next steps by helping me to clearly understand the inputs and outputs of my running. As a bit of a statistical geek (I’m a lean six sigma black belt so I do a lot of data analysis) I like to have a deeper understanding of the data, the Stryd pod really helps with that.
My training plan said to run a power zone 2 run (that’s almost a walk by the way!) for 50 minutes. How it ended up was somewhat different from a power perspective.
We have a 4 mile route we follow on a Saturday morning, leaving Northleach, going uphill in the general direction of Cheltenham. We are used to the hill, but the effect of the wind was something of a challenge while trotting up the hill.
A zone 2 run for me puts me in the range of 209-242 watts, as you can see below, there were points when I was at 486 watts, while there were only gusts of wind causing that, the rest of the time the wind was mostly a headwind making it almost (well, mostly!) impossible to stay within the correct power zone while also making the total running time longer than it should have been because we were slowing down dramatically!
Since November 2019 I’ve been training for an ultra run (62 miles over 2 days) but this weekend run with my friend is much more of a social thing and to try to ‘give back’ by helping someone else become a ‘runner’
Tomorrow should be interesting as I have a tougher run planned, I will let you know how I get on with that!
How was your run today? How do you analyse your data?
Big Bloke Running 