giving trainasone.com a whirl

For the last few weeks I have been increasing the mileage, trying to keep to the 10% rule i.e. do not up your effort too quickly as this can lead to injury so week "A" you do 10 miles then next week "B" you do 11 miles.

So far it has worked and the mileage is getting there with a mixture of longer runs and now one extra day, so trying to do 4 runs a week.

Strava however has a new feature for "Summit' users (formerly known as premium) on the iPhone, it looks to track your effort for the week and compare to the previous week. so as you progress through the week it warns if you are pushing it too hard or the opposite.
It does this based on the suffer score (Strava's measure of your heart rate vs pace etc during runs.

Try and keep in the white zone

As you progress the week, it advises you

This is good but I still cannot seem to reconcile how to balance the effort, I want to increase mileage but this pushes me over, running slow is no good to me as it historically led to injury (change in running gait) so as you can see I have yet to keep in the "Zone"

By chance on one of my runs I came across a club mate who I have not seen in ages, as we ran around Shaw together I talked about how I getting back and trying to plan my runs he told me of some software he uses. The conversation was somewhat difficult as my fitness is still way off, but the basis of what he said was you set a goal, the website tells him what to do, it reviews how it went and using AI sets your next few runs.

So a few days later I contacted him via facebook and got the name of the website, trainasone.com it has a free account or premium coming at £6 a month and you can use a 21 day trial. It was easy to link to Strava and pulled in the last few months of data so it has a good knowledge of what you have been up to.

For the first few weeks it sets a good number of different "Assessment" runs, these are made up of different stages to a run i.e. walk, easy, all out for set durations.

As you complete runs it adjusts the future assessments and what it refers to "Economy" runs i.e. a normal go out for 6 miles at 8:40 pace.

This can make it difficult to remember to do as you run so writing it on my hand the only way to do this.

On the morning of the run a reminder of the objective is emailed to you

The on the go version!

So far so good and it only shows you a few weeks and the website explains in the beginning it might look as you are doing less but it is key to establish a baseline for all paces like tempo and threshold.

The last run of the week was a struggle as was still very hungover from Saturdays Latics trip to Morecambe. It had plenty of slow pace sections with a 2 mile "fast as you can" effort in the middle, given this took in 2 hills I did my best!

It may be a co-incidence but trainasone.com seems to have delivered my first week "in the zone"

Thanks for reading

Mark