Friday: A short run

I stayed at work too long, so my window for OTW rowing was gone. I drove home, switched to running gear and set off. It was a nice, warm day, and it was good to be in the hilly forest behind our house, after a long time.

I decided to try out the Wahoo Tickr’s RunFit app, which promises to extract extra running metrics from the Wahoo Tickr X and I was curious to see how it works. Of course, I took the good old Garmin Forerunner 220 as a backup.

I had to make dinner for the family to come back from their race prep (it’s the International Youth Regatta in Brno this weekend), so I didn’t have too much time to run.

The RunFit app was interesting. After every kilometer, a computer lady voice told me “distance x kilometer heart rate 155 pace previous lap 5 minutes 7 seconds”. It annoyed me quite a lot, because the RunFit kilometers were about 100m shorter than the Garmin kilometers. I trust the Garmin more, because it is very consistent with the SpeedCoach, with CrewNerd (running on the same iPhone as the RunFit app) and with other apps. Interesting that an app running on the same hardware can disagree with another app. Funny algorithms. Not enough data smoothing. Something like that. It proves again that doing sports data science is not easy.

After the run, the app offered me the promised stats. Here they are (in screenshot form):

So apart from Cadence we have running smoothness, vertical oscillation and ground contact. So according to RunFit my ground contact was 173ms, and according to this link elite runners are under 200 ms. To be honest, I have no idea whether my running metrics are good or bad (and I honestly don’t care much as long as I don’t get injured while running), and to make matters worse, I don’t trust metrics measured by an app that doesn’t get distance right.

By the end of the run, the Garmin was 1km behind the RunFit app.

When I exported the run from RunFit to Strava, Runkeeper, and TrainingPeaks, I was curious to see if the extra metrics would make it across.

Strava? Nope

TrainingPeaks? The sync didn’t work, so I don’t know

Runkeeper? Nope

So all in all I am not so impressed. I am more impressed by the website VeloViewer, which integrates very nicely with Strava.

http://veloviewer.com/activities/982844482

You can make cool 3D pictures like this one:

There are also a few plots and additional statistics to explore, and everything looks very nice and slick.

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