Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Sunday, June 13, 2004 How hard do you run during an O' race?I wonder how hard different people run when they orienteer. I guess one way to look at that is to look at heart rate data.Yesterday I took it easy (but was out for a long time so it was still a tough day). I kept a steady pace. My heart rate averaged 146. I suspect that running at the same pace on a day with cool weather would have given my a heart rate average of about 140. That's not hard at all. For the relay race at TJOC, I ran a good bit harder. My average heart rate was 173. That is about as hard as I can run. This season I typically run an A-meet at about 163-166 for an average heart rate. My max heart rate is right about 180-182. I suppose if I did a max heart rate test it might get a little bit higher -- we'll say 185. My normal O' race pace (163) is about 88 percent of my maximum. In general, when I look at the curve from a race it is fairly even. My heart rate goes to about 160-165 and stays there. It'll drop briefly at water stops or booms where I have to stand a bit to relocate. What about other people? I've been looking at my own h.r. data for a few years. I have a fairly good idea of how my h.r. curve will look before I download the data. I'm rarely surprised by either the average or the shape of the curve. But, what about other orienteers? How hard do other people run? How much variation do they have in their h.r. curves? One of the cool things about the internet is that I could get answers (or at least something like an answer) by looking at people's logs on Attackpoint or looking at other orienteers' web pages. Today I spent a few minutes looking at Emma Engstrand's training log. Engstrand is a top Swedish runner who (conveniently for me) logs her heart rate average and max for a lot of her sessions. Unfortunately, she doesn't usually log the data for races. Maybe she doesn't use a heart rate monitor in competitions. I looked at a couple months of her training and the highest h.r. she recorded was 182. If you use the very rough method of 220-age to calculate max h.r., Engstrand's would be 194. So, I'll split the difference and guess that her maximum h.r. is 188. The highest average h.r. I saw for Engstrand's O' training was for sprint sessions. She had average h.r. for some sprint training races of 163-168. For other O' sessions, her heart rate averages was lower. As an example, on April 16, Engstrand ran a middle-distance course of 7.6 km at a WOC training camp with an average h.r. of 152 and a max of 162. If you calculate race average as a percent of 188, you get up to about 89 percent for some sprint sessions and about 81 percent. I don't know if it is fair to use average-as-a-percent-of-maximum as a measure of how hard someone is running. It seems like a measure, but perhaps not the best measure (probably a mix of heart rates, perceived effort and pace would be best). What to make of this... Well, I wouldn't make much of it. I guess it suggests that running an O' race is hard work. No kidding. What I really ought to do is look at some different people and see how they stack up. posted by Michael | 4:45 PM 
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