When Nancy Lennon wants to figure out what she can accomplish in a run, she doesn’t go for a gut check or scope out her shoes. Instead, she goes straight to the numbers.
“I track all my numbers for every run because it’s all about pushing myself and my pace,” says the 41-year-old Toronto mother. “I would never have thought that I can do what I do if I didn’t see it on paper … just looking at those numbers is what really pushes me.”
For many people, running leads to an obsession with digits, as they track every detail of their progress to stay motivated and go the extra kilometre. And while number-crunching is much simpler than it used to be, thanks to a range of watches, websites and smart-phone applications, focusing too much on the figures can be a harmful distraction, running coaches say.
“With running there’s this natural gravitation towards crunching numbers,” says Michal Kapral, editor-in-chief of Canadian Running Magazine. “You’re always asking yourself, ‘How far am I going? How fast? What’s my pace per kilometre? How do I convert to pace per mile? If I ran this pace for a five k what would I run it in?’ ”
Chris Whelan checks his GPS watch during a lunchtime run in St. John's.— Paul Daly for The Globe and Mail
Chris Whelan, a 52-year-old transit planner who lives in St. John’s, looks forward to two things during the work day. One is going for a run on his lunch hour. The other is uploading the data from his Garmin running watch onto his computer the second he’s back at his desk.
“I get excited to come back to the office and plug it in and see what did I do today,” says Mr. Whelan, who took running up seriously a little more than three years ago.
Monitoring his heart rate came in handy during a half marathon in Halifax in 2008.
“I knew that if I keep my heart rate under 150 beats per minute I could go for a good long time. So once it started getting over 150 I’d work on getting it down again,” Mr. Whelan says.
He will also keep track of each run’s time and his pace.
“To stay motivated, you’ve got to have things to keep you going, and numbers certainly help.”
Keeping track of numbers allows runners to analyze their progress and to compete against themselves as they try to shave time off their last run or improve their pace. And crunching numbers, whether it’s a route’s distance and elevation or a runner’s heart rate, is easier than ever, says Mike Booth, a running coach and founder of Winnipeg-based Endurance Matters, which provides training plans for endurance runners.
“It’s very simple, whereas it wasn’t too long ago you’d have people doing a run and then getting in the car wanting to know how far they went. Now you just log on to the computer,” he says.
There are dozens of websites and smart-phone applications that allow runners to log just about any number they might be interested in, from calories burned to how steep a route is to how many stops you made along the way.
“It can be more of a curse than a blessing,” says Kevin Smith, a running coach and founder of Marathon Dynamics, a training facility in Mississauga, Ont. Many runners who use gadgets may become so obsessed with what the device is telling them that they ignore things such as topography or weather. “They start braking and trying to slow down the rhythm when it was free speed and free flow and they could have just worked with the topography and the land contour,” he says.
