Sunday, March 20, 2011

Tempo run explained

Josh and I were talking a little bit about the tempo run and how to pace for it. Sometimes it is easier to just see a picture.

Here's my run from today:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/73552849

 

Scroll down to the charts section and here's what to look at:  (blue – warmup and cooldown, black- build or descend, red – 3 minutes at 5K pace)

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  1. Heart Rate - It slowly rose to a peak around 17 minutes, then came down and leveled off between 17 and 25, then came down even more as I slowed down at 25 minutes to cool down.

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  1. Pace - first few minutes were slow, after about 5 I sped up and held pretty much the same pace to 14 minutes. Then, at 14 minutes I picked up the pace for 3 minutes. My target was to get my HR as high into zone 4 as possible during those 3 minutes.  Then backed off and tried to hold a steady pace to 25 minutes.  For the last 5 minutes, my goal was to bring my HR back down into zone 1, so that forced me to slow down and not finish out of breath.

When you guys do this workout, the shape of those graphs should look the same for everyone.  I'll analyze your run or bike activities if you upload them and share them with me.  If you have a garmin watch, http://connect.garmin.com allows you to upload and share them for free. There are plenty of other websites as well.

 

The spike in HR around 5 minutes is just because it reads high when it doesn't have a good connection with my skin. Once I sweated enough, the connection got better and read correctly. It messes up some avg numbers but you can infer a straight line through the messed up area since my pace didn't significantly change.

 

Reid

 

 

Reid Weber

Software Engineer, Global Technical Architecture

 

International Game Technology

Office: +1 775.448.0492

Mobile: +1 775.233.5859

reid.weber@igt.com

twitter: @rweber

 

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