Highlight of the week – progressing from 30 second runs to 1 minute runs with no issues. Oh and lot’s of data science stuff.

This Week

Monday

A busy day at work and I noted I was feeling “below average” in my training log. So I didn’t get anything done exercise wise but I’m fine with that, recovery is just as, if not more important than training.

Weigh in was 64.9kg and 18.7% body fat.

Tuesday

I headed down to the track to do my run/walk. 30 minute walk with 10 x 30 sec jog (1 min walk). I went around the outside of the track a couple times to make it a little more interesting and also meant I ran on the track a little bit which felt fine.

Wednesday

In the afternoon I had a physio appointment with Cara. My new posture cue seems to be going pretty well, some exercises it’s still quite tricky so a bit of work to do still, but seems promising. Running program increases to 1 min jogs and I’m also doing some vertical jumps in my strength exercises – squat, jump and land softly.

I’ve started trialing an app named Final Surge for run coaching. This is a little like Training Peaks, I can set up the runner’s training program which they can view on the website or through an app on their phone, and they can link their Garmin account so when they complete their run it automatically updates the training program.

The main difference to Training Peaks is that Training Peaks is very data focused which I love of course but I think Final Surge is better for actually coaching.  It’s really set up well to get feedback from the runner. So for example here is a screenshot where Deb has put in how she felt and perceived effort of the run, also not shown but she also added a comment with more detail. From designing and tweaking a training program this stuff is gold.

Thursday

At lunch I got out and did my 1 min jogs around Carlton Gardens. It’s really nice being able to run for 1 minute at a time, sounds funny saying that but compared to 30 seconds it’s a lot better. At 1 minute I’m actually starting to feel like a runner again.

I missed my Thursday night swim this week in favour of going to dinner!

Friday

Gym session during lunch – 15 minutes on the cross trainer (pretty light since I only started doing it recently), rehab exercises and upper body weights. I’m glad to be able to do it at lunch as it meant I could go out to the last european night market and not feel guilty.

Saturday

I went to the Western Aths pack run at Woodlands Park. I’m glad I did, the weather was beautiful and I really enjoyed my little runs and walk around the park. I ended up doing 47 minutes in total to complete a bit of a loop with 8 x 1 min running.

Saturday afternoon/night and most of the day Sunday I got stuck into my data science project. The response from Western Athletics members and the wider running community has been pretty awesome, a little slow at first but a good boost with some social media help from Claire Hodgart. As of now I have 27 samples, that’s I have received 12 weeks of training data from 27 people who raced Albert Park 10km, across a good mix of ages, gender and race times. Which is amazing a good sample size to get some useful results out of.

I spent many hours parsing the data this weekend which was actually really enjoyable. Quite a bit of trouble shooting data issues. One of the main issues I had was that the data out of Garmin had times in the format of “35:00:00” or “00:35:00” or “35:00” all of these are equal to 35 minutes, what the hell Garmin. So I had to build this complicated custom function to split the numbers out, decide if the first number is hours or minutes (based on the size of that number and also the distance of the run), and multiple or divide numbers to convert it all into minutes decimal.

Another big issue were dates with a combination of US and AU date formats. When I tried to aggregate activities by weeks it completely failed because of this, I had to go back and handle some athletes data different to others. There were also a lot of other data issues that I could go on and on about lol.. good fun though.

Sunday got more exciting when I was able to import age grade factors, and calculate age grades for everyone’s 10km race result. What this does is make everyone’s race result comparable which is much more useful to use then just looking at the race time. I also calculated threshold training paces based on the 10km result using the jack daniel’s VDOT tables. From this I can calculate the intensity of a run – average pace for the run divided by threshold pace = intensity factor. With intensity factor we now have a good way to compare training across all athletes, the intensity of their training compared to their 10km race result.

I haven’t done any modelling yet but looking at some scatter plots there certainly appears to be some correlations in the data. Here is one example which just looking at the plot you would probably say more kms ran per week correlates with a better 10km result.. to a point. However further analysis is needed. Age grade can be translated as > 0 an athlete, > 0.7 regional class, > 0.8 national class, > 0.9 world class, 1 = world record level.

Sunday

At the pool Sunday morning for the usual water running with Sharon. We had a new visitor this time, unfortunately he didn’t get the memo about the 8am start time.

Sunday night we had dinner at Mum and Dad’s to celebrate Alex’s new job. I’m slightly concerned about tomorrow morning’s weigh in.

Detail

Song of the week

This song has been owning me this week therefore song of the week. It’s great how easy it is to discover music these days, I think this song came up in a “new punk tracks” playlist on Spotify, which then made it on to my monthly playlist, which after a couple listens I thought do these guys have an album, and then I listened to their album a few times during the week.

Coming up

Sports doctor appointment Tuesday, most likely the last one, and also physio appointment.

XCR Round 7 at Ballarat – I’ll likely be out there as a helper.

Summary