Sep
2
The Merits of the Metrics
I recommend a slightly more advanced unit than this.
Photo credit: Tag Heuer Stopwatch by Flickr user William Warby, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.
As I’ve posted before, different runners have different purposes and motivations. Some run for health, some run to escape, some run to achieve clarity, some run for friendship. For many of these goals, measurements like time and distance don’t matter much (though if you run for health, it’s likely you care about your weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and the like). If that’s the case, I admire you and applaud your commitment to this great sport, but this post may not be for you.
Some of us run for performance, to push our limits, to set personal records, to reach ever-increasing goals. While my motivations may change as I age and some of these drivers become more difficult to achieve, I currently fall in this category, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. It fits my personality – I love work that involves metrics, be it sales, profit, period-to-period comparisons, or whatever else can be measured that shows progress. I’m a competitive (but in a friendly, good-sport kind of way) person, and it drives my approach to many things I do in life. I even check the analytics on this blog on a (too) regular basis, to see what you are most interested in, most eager to share, and what makes you passionate enough to join in the conversation.
For this type of runner, numbers mean a lot – maybe not “everything,” but definitely a lot. We love tracking not just our totals but our splits. Elevation changes. Heart rate (though I haven’t really gotten into that just yet). We watch our trends over time – miles, average pace. We create our own tracking spreadsheets because no other system seems to do it quite the way we want to see it. We compare workouts to previous efforts (and, to be frank, to the workouts of other similar runners) and analyze the differences. We build training plans that count on improvements in performance, and obsess over our progress versus the plan (and use spreadsheets to track said progress). We use calculators to predict our future race times and set targets. And we couldn’t live without our GPS watches and related software (sorry, foot-strike related devices just aren’t precise enough for us).
Intense? Yes. Obsessive? Could be. Dangerous? Maybe, if we don’t listen to our bodies and keep an eye on our balance (and, apparently even overuse of a GPS watch can cause injury). But if performance is your goal, without focusing on metrics and investing in the tools and time required (and the time involves elements beyond just the actual training), you are running blind. “Running naked” has its place. But as my father-in-law likes to say (and offered me as career advice many years ago), “we have the infinite capacity to improve everything.” There will someday come a time when the investment needed to make further improvements is not worth the return, due to risk of injuries, other priorities, etc. Until then, I’ll obsess over my splits, even if it’s a “recovery” run, and just see where this journey takes us. Thank you for joining along on it so far, and I hope you’ll continue to join me. At the end, I do run for friendship too, even if it’s more of the “virtual” kind.
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