Week 15, 2012

Showtime

So, this week the Paris test finally came. I will not write about this week, since I already did it in the Paris marathon post. However, I thought that this week is a good opportunity to roll out the changes to the training presentation :). Frankly, I was already quite happy with the previous version as it essentially contained all the crucial information about all the trainings in the week (compare it to Endomondo's or RunKeeper's calendar views and hopefully you'll understand why I was happy with my version).

But understanding all this information required carefully inspecting all the numbers. The main advantage of the big changes that I'm finally rolling out today is that now all this information is visualized and available at a glance. Both time & distance have their bars; their length corresponds to trainings length (time- and distance-wise). After the bar gets its full weight (2:00 time and 20km distance) it starts growing horizontally: you can see that well on the Sunday's marathon entry.

What's even cooler (if you ask me) is that those bars are color-coded based on intensity (and it looks even cooler when the calendar takes up the whole available width). Like this little orange/red part in the Tuesday training? That's strides. And the blue/orange in Thursday is high intensity intervals mixed with low intensity rest in between them. Finally dark Sunday is the all-high-intense race time :).

For HR I used that HR zones of Jerzy Skarzynski, that I've been using in training for years. I had much more problems with pace zones, as I could not find a reliable "standard". Joe Friel's guide seemed promising but the zones somehow did not correspond well with my trainings. In the end I just hand picked some values, basing them on my 10K race pace. Here are the zones I'm using:

IntensityHR rangeMy HRPace rangeMy pace
Based on HRmaxBased on 10K race speed
Unknown
No effort<60%<112 bpm<70% >6:02 min/km
Minimal 61-70% 112-130 bpm71-75% 5:38-6:02 min/km
Low 71-75% 131-140 bpm76-80% 5:17-5:38 min/km
Medium 76-80% 141-149 bpm81-90% 4:42-5:17 min/km
Hard 81-90% 150-168 bpm91-100% 4:14-4:42 min/km
Maximal >90%>169 bpm>100%< 4:14 min/km

I'm still planning to experiment with further splitting every zone intro three sub-zones with slightly diverting colors, but that will have to wait for next week. The only problem I have with this solution is that with sports, time and pace zones all color-coded the whole thing looks a bit like a rainbow. And I don't mean it as a good thing. But maybe it's not a problem and just requires some getting used to?

In any case, comments and suggestions for improvements, as always, very welcome. Oh and by the way, the message about unsupported browser is not legit, but somehow I'm having hard time getting rid of it (eventually, will do)...

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