Random Running Questions

Question about LTHR...

Context: I started running recently after a few years of dwindling cycling, am about 8 weeks in and doing about 3 hours/week of mostly easy running with the odd park run and 10k thrown in, plus maybe 3-4 hours of cycling for fun and to boost the aerobic base.

I'm a lot slower than when I was cycling regularly. Back in 2013 I could walk out the door and do a 21-22 min 5k with no warm up, now I struggle to get in the 24s on a park run. I would like to get back to that form!

I found a lab report from 11 years ago (when I was quite a lot fitter) with interesting details like my HR @ TLac of 163bpm.

This is much lower than I'd expected/remembered. My RHR is about 50bpm, MHR a bit north of 180bpm, I did a 10k last Sunday around 170-175bpm, finishing at 180bpm. When I did TTs on the bike I would also be in the 170s, so I had this idea that my "threshold" HR was about 170 and this is what I plugged into my Forerunner profile ("LTHR") and Intervals.icu (which I use for tracking training load).

So, the question: should I knock the LTHR all the way down to my 11 year old test value of 163bpm? This will presumably affect the zones and training load calculations. It seems a bit mad that I'm able to run a 10k (slowly!) at over 10bpm higher than LTHR. Is that normal?

OK, that's useful thanks! I will update the thresholds in my techie things then.

I said the 10k was slow, not easy 😀

edit: I do have a Wahoo Tickr chest strap which is apparently compatible with my Forerunner 265, but I haven't bothered doing that yet. Does the Garmin automatically switch over to a chest strap in preference to its own HR readings once it's paired?

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this. Doing Berlin Marathon in September. Not overly fussed on time, but around 4 hours would be nice (PB 3.28)

I'd like to substitute in a 1 hour 5 a side for one of my easy recovery runs as I am finding it difficult to do 4 runs and football per week and don't want to give up football! I am still doing my long run, 800m repeats and medium distance runs per week.

Is 1 hour of football the same / better / worse than a 6km easy run?

During most of my DCM training last year I continued to referee soccer, often 3 games on Saturday. I added it to my volume rather than substituting, but its a tricky one. In a game, my heart rate would remained low (recovery level, despite covering ~8km a game) due to the stop/start/sprint nature of the game, but its certainly not recovery. Probably closer to easy with short strides but you still have those impact challenges and turns to deal with in a match.

Also, back in a previous life, I ran Dublin following HH beginner and played 5 a side on astro up until mid summer.

Personally, I wouldn't be overly bothered about playing a weekly 5 a side instead of a 6km easy run, except I'd say there is a very high chance of injury, and do you want to take that chance? I was asked that question last year and I continued refereeing until I felt the risk was too high.

I thought I was being smart dumping a cup of water over myself during a warm run last night, but today I feel like someone has been at my chest with a belt sander. I was wearing a Mizuno running t-shirt which is normally exceptionally comfortable.

Any tips? I suppose "don't pour water over yourself" would be one. "Body glide" is apparently a thing but I have no idea really.

I put on Vaseline (well, tesco petroleum jelly) on for any runs longer and I haven't had any issues.

Absolutely no problem at all. Time on feet. Sometimes a short stop is very beneficial. Stopping in the middle of a tempo session would be a different matter, although a justifiable stop is always OK.

This is a random running question I've had puzzling me for a while but never enough to actually research or ask about it, until now.

Actually as I'm about to type this it sounds idiotic but anyway - when doing a 10k tempo run locally I only have one location that is appropriate (i.e. not too hilly and no traffic to worry about). I plan on doing a 2km warm up, 10km tempo then a 2km cool down. All grand except if I want to do that then I potentially end up tired and 14km from home, or maybe 10km from home if I do my cool down on as part of my return.

Obviously what I've always done therefore is double back at around the 5km mark but this consistently messes up my paces and my GPS for a bit, before things settle down and my watch realises what I've done. So my question is this - is there a feature of running watches that I don't know about that irons out this momentary kink in pace and GPS tracking so it appears like my run is all in sequence? I don't want to pause the run, but maybe there's a magic eraser of pace drops when doubling back that I don't know about.

My usual route is an out-and-back and I've not noticed this to be a problem on my Garmin 265S with dual-band GPS set to auto, but the route is mixed surfaces and often has tailwind out-headwind back so I don't really use paces for pacing but HR instead.

It surely can't make that much of a difference? If you're using auto lap then pace the rest of the lap by perceived effort, and if you're using manual laps press the lap button just before you turn and then again a few seconds afterwards.

What's "a bit"? If you mean you have your display set to show current pace, I'd expect a u-turn to cause some issues for 30/60 seconds or so, but if that's affecting you, you're spending too much time paying attention to your watch

Yeah, this really is the smallest of irritants, I should just get over myself but I figured I'd ask as I've had it at the back of my mind for ages. When I'm running these tempo runs I like seeing consistent times over the laps and when I double back there's always a pace spike and a delay while I get back up to speed. Since getting my Fenix 6 the GPS seems less likely to screw up when doubling back so that half of the issue appears to be sorted.

Roughly 4:1 depending on what you are doing, so a 20k commute cycle would be similar to a 5k easy run.

Yes, but I'd still be inclined to make up at least half of the easy kms elsewhere in the week, as there is quite a bit of specificity with running muscle recruitment.

There's interesting data on pro cyclists doing marathons without running training. The best that can be said is that they're not awful by recreational standards. 😀

Does anyone else find Strava privacy settings kind of weird?

My goal is to hide my maps from being public, a fairly straight forward goal I would think.

So they allow you to set privacy settings on two aspects of your account: Profile and Activities

Maps live under activities, so if you make that "followers only" you hide the maps from being public. So far so good.

Setting Profile "everyone" allows anyone to see only activity summaries, which I would be fine with, but for some reason it removes the ability to approve follow requests, basically making the "followers only" only setting of activities pointless as anyone can follow you at any time.

So for the moment I just have both profile and activities set to "followers only", but it does seems strange to me that they even allow them to be separate at all

It is possible to take the nuclear option of just hiding the maps completely, but that setting only applied going forward, so I'm guessing you'd have to manually go through all your historical runs and hide the maps

I just have everything set to "followers" except Local Legends and Fly-By which are set to no-one, map hiding is off and start/end hiding is on.

Do you really need this set to "everyone"?