Welcome to my newsletter 'Never not [thinking about] running.' A newsletter about running and mental health. In today's newsletter, I'll talk about numbers and how much value they’ll provide. If you are interested in more of these texts, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter. I cheer for every new subscriber and you’ll definitely make me a happy boy. But now to the numbers part.
I still remember when I started running, I used to bike every route beforehand. Why? Because I had a speedometer that showed me, black on white, how far I would run. Because back then, there were no GPS watches. No fancy phones, footpods, or anything like that. Just the good old bike speedometer. The results were then put into an Excel spreadsheet. A confirmation of what I could achieve.
In the beginning there was no internet
Excel, because there was no internet, no Strava. You get the trick. I’m old. During those bike rides, I mentally marked each kilometer. That way, I could roughly estimate my pace. It sounds like a lot of mental work, but since I only ran 2-3 routes and the distance was manageable, I could handle it.
Then I just ran. More or less with common sense. No training plan. Just for the fun of it. But somehow, I was still interested in the numbers. For the fun of it.
Numbers everywhere
Years later, if not decades, things are different with the numbers. There are sports watches or smart devices like the Oura-Ring that measure everything imaginable, from distance and heart rate to power values or the oxygen saturation level in your blood, sleep phases, or nighttime resting heart rate. A treasure trove for me, who not only uses platforms like Strava or the watch's own online training tool but also still maintains my own little database to log everything related to running. Where else could I note that I was running with a headlamp? Just as an example.
Many of the values spit out by these devices are quite reliable. Distances are more or less accurate, definitely more precise than my bicycle speedometer method, watt values are also quite reliable, as are heart rate values if you have the appropriate device. It gets trickier with health metrics that almost every device spits out nowadays. The technology attempts to combine various variables and tell you in the morning how fit you are or how fit you should feel. Sometimes I wake up feeling like I could conquer the world, and my Oura ring tells me I should take it easy today. (Oura generates a 'Readiness Score' every day.)
The problem with things like ‘Readiness-scores’
We all know that feeling, right? Sometimes we laugh about it, sometimes we wonder why technology can't do better, and sometimes a sense of unease creeps into our minds. Yeah. Maybe I don't feel that great today after all. Our own sense of our bodies gets lost. I had a ‘78’ yesterday, but today only a ‘75’. What does that mean?
When I had burnout in 2018, I would have welcomed an Oura-ring because during that phase, I had no clue what my body wanted from me. It would have given me a hint. Often more in the direction. Hey - perhaps it is not as bad as you think. When I regained more trust in my body, it would have been bad again because I wasn’t so stable that a bad result wouldn’t have thrown me off track. Today, I'm 'fine' again with all these numbers, and I know how to interpret the results, and indeed, I find them very helpful to interpret things. An example.
Where the numbers help
I've always felt like I'm fittest in the summer. Why that is, is another story.
A glance at the so-called ‘Readiness Score’ from Oura doesn't confirm that for me. If it should is another question. Oura tries to bring together various factors like heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, sleep phases, sleep quantity, and the amount of activities performed (Here you can read how it works). They say, that the result is also a result of a trend not only a result of the last day. Roughly. If you’re fit, I would imagine, you’re more often ready in the morning. But it doesn’t work out every time.
But yes, it can yield good results. If HRV goes down, resting heart rate goes up, and you haven't done much the day before ‘readiness score’ goes down, an illness might be looming. Might be. But maybe you already felt that.
For my running form and physical fitness, I actually only take individual values like HRV, and then the suspicion that I'm much fitter in the summer is confirmed.
Or with the lowest nighttime heart rate.
Or with breathing (the lower, the fitter).
Oura even sees no correlation between HRV and my ‘readiness score’.
So be careful what you take from these numbers and what you want to know. The 'readiness score' is ultimately meant to determine whether one should exert themselves more or not. And that works in most cases. Just because you're 'ready' doesn't mean you're in good shape. These are different things which can easily mixed up.
And so you can check various things to see if body feeling and values align. But also running form and values that - in this case, the ring spits out. Traditionally, I'm in my best running form in September. I run the fastest times with lower heart rates compared to the rest of the year.
What’s the takeaway?
The question now is whether I can capitalize on this realization. This year, I probably trained as hard in the first four months as in the summer months, but the results looked completely different. Why? I suspect that the cold season, low temperatures, and continuous running in the dark influenced values and results more toward the negative. I'll delve into this more this winter because I want to be fit for the UTMB in May.
Otherwise, I should probably set my peak performance at a competition for early September!
How about you? What do you take from your smart device to make your life or training better?
Housekeeping
I managed 37k last week. Mainly just checking out how the cold affected my body. So no hardcore long runs or crazy interval sessions. Another goal was to avoid rain, which is nearly impossible these days. Highlight workout was on Thursday after work. No light on the tracks, but an easy warm-up and then 4 x 400m hard/400m easy and then a cool-down. Felt good!
The end:
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Yep, I used to bike-measure routes (and map-measure them) because I "needed" the data. When I got my first gps watch (the Timex model with the separate receiver unit you wore on your upper arm) I felt so liberated, because I could now choose routes on the fly (and even go off-trail) and still "get credit" for the distance. I'm not sure exactly where the need for numbers comes from, but I think mainly I distrust my subjective assessment of things, and hard numbers like time, distance, and heart rate tell me objective truths. All those other numbers from current watches, though... I mainly don't even look at them.