Treadmill workout part II
I did a FIRST tempo run on the treadmill tonight. The goal was to run 3 miles @ 6:45 pace in between a warm up and cool down. A few people had asked me what incline setting I was using when I ran on a treadmill. I did some research and found “The 1% Incline Treadmill Myth” (and part II) which seemed to have reasonable coverage of the available studies. After reading these I decided to not set an incline. In a few weeks once I have more baseline data I’ll try changing the incline a bit and see what it does to my heart rate at paces compared to earlier runs.
After my warmup was completed, I started increasing the treadmill speed so I could go after the 6:45 target pace. After flipping through the speed adjuster I saw that 8.8 MPH is a 6:48 pace and 8.9 MPH equals a 6:44 pace. I decided I would switch between the two during the workout, trying to stay at 8.9 MPH about 3/4 of the time. Switching the pace a tiny bit during the run helps break up some of the metronome type feel of running on the treadmill. The first mile went by without a lot of effort with my heart rate reaching 172 BPM towards the end. At about a mile and a half I could definitely feel heat starting to build up and I was sweating pretty heavily. The downside of no air resistance is that you don’t get the cooling effect of the air going past you and during busy times at the gym when there are a lot of people working out on the aerobic equipment you can feel the heat and humidity start to rise. Heart rate for the 2nd mile averaged 174 with a peak of 177. The 3rd mile ended up with an average HR of 179. I definitely felt like I could have kicked it in harder, but that would defeat the point of the workout. I then dialed the speed down to a 12 minute mile and started my cool down.
I had the Garmin footpod on during the run. I noticed that it was within 1-2% of the treadmill for measuring the distance during the tempo part of the workout. When I switched to 12 minute and 10 minute miles during the cool down, it wasn’t reading as close (off by about 30 seconds a mile). Viewing the footpod pace data in Garmin Training Center, I can see the data points jump around quite a bit (although that is the case with GPS data as well).
November 30th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Bill, I am curious then, do you consider the foot pod a good purchase? And do you recommend it to others?
Since I will be joining the ranks of the treadmill faithful soon I am considering getting one.
November 30th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
There may be better footpod/heart-rate monitor combos out there, but for treadmill frequenting people who do their training with a Forerunner I think it is worth the $50. I’ll happily let you borrow it for a run or two at the gym so you can try it for yourself. Right now motionbased won’t let you upload workouts that don’t have GPS coordinates. They list the feature as “coming soon”, but I also saw some forum responses saying the same thing in 2006. I guess I shouldn’t complain unless I become a paying customer.
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Unless MotionBased reduces their prices I wouldn’t even consider being a customer.
I think I will just order a pod. It’s not like I am going to buy an entire other HRM just for indoor work.
Thanks for the info.